John Updike Quotes
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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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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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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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Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.
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He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
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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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'...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months.' He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.
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Harry having drawn at golf The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
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Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
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When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.
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A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
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at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
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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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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.