John Updike Quotes
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
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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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re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
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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.
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His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.
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Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
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Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
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Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'
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At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
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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.
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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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She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
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'You are cynical.'
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The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
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A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
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Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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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.