John Updike Quotes
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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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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
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Life is noise.
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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
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There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
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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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Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'
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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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'Things change,' says Mr Shimada. 'Is world's sad secret.'
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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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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.
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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...'
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Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
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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.
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As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
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Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
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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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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'