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John Updike Quotes
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American
-
Critic
&
Author
March 18, 1932
American
-
Critic
&
Author
March 18, 1932
Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.
John Updike
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.
John Updike
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything—dead meat, living meat, old bones—
John Updike
A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast. Piet was moved, beholding his daughter launched intoanother dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thornes had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Piet saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever.” John Updike, Couples, 1968.
John Updike
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John Updike
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
John Updike
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
John Updike
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
John Updike
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John Updike
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
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