John Updike quotes - page 8

Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience. (John Updike)
Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are. View quote
John Updike
Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose? View quote
John Updike
The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery-the mystery of ‘any place,' prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?'-ignites panic in his heart. View quote
John Updike
You don't stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That's how stupid we are. View quote
John Updike
The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar - these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose. View quote
John Updike
Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know. View quote
John Updike
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb. View quote
John Updike
Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into. View quote
John Updike
Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with. View quote
John Updike
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. (John Updike)
Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies. View quote
John Updike
But the fast lane too gets to be a rut. View quote
John Updike
[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct." View quote
John Updike
Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind. View quote
John Updike
[Annabelle] "...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much." View quote
John Updike
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. View quote
John Updike
[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species." View quote
John Updike
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. View quote
John Updike
You are cynical. View quote
John Updike
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. (John Updike)
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. View quote
John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. View quote
John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. View quote
John Updike
He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame. View quote
John Updike