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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.
John Updike -
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike -
He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
John Updike -
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
John Updike -
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike -
Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'
John Updike -
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
John Updike
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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
John Updike -
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?
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Pru '...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal.'
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
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She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Life is noise.
John Updike -
Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'
John Updike -
Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
John Updike -
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
John Updike
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Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
'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.'
John Updike -
As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
John Updike