John Updike Quotes
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
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Pru '...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal.'
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'Driving is boring,' Rabbit pontificates, 'but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.'
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These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
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You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.
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Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, 'You ever been to Toledo?'
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We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
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In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.
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There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
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Re Annabelle ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.
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Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
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At last, small witches, goblins, hags,And pirates armed with paper bags,Their costumes hinged on safety pins,Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
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He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
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Janice Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.
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Nelson, about Harry 'I saw him, eventually,' Nelson says, 'as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. ... But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way.'
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...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
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I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.