John Updike Quotes
-
Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?
-
re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
-
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
-
Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'
-
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
-
...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
-
Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
-
Nelson, to Annabelle 'The misery of the world,' he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. 'That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up...'
-
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
-
In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.
-
Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.
-
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.
-
Life is noise.
-
coming away from the doctor's after a check-up Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
-
She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
-
As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
-
Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
-
It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.
-
Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
-
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.
-
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
-
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
-
We are most alive when we’re in love.
-
The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.