John Updike Quotes
-
Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
-
Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
-
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
-
Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
-
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.
-
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
-
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.
-
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
-
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.
-
As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
-
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.
-
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?
-
When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
-
She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
-
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
-
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
-
I think 'taste' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
-
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.
-
Life is noise.
-
'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
-
He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
-
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.
-
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
-
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.