John Updike Quotes
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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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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Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
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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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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.
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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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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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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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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Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
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'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
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These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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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 the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.