John Updike quotes - page 8

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic, widely celebrated for his insightful portrayal of everyday life. His works, including the acclaimed "Rabbit" series, explore themes of identity, faith, and middle-class American experience. He remains a significant figure in modern American literature for his elegant prose and perceptive social commentary. Here are 289 of his quotes:

Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

John Updike

Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?

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.

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.

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.

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.

John Updike

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

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.

John Updike

Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.

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.

John Updike

But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.

John Updike

[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

John Updike

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

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."

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.

John Updike

[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

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.

John Updike

You are cynical.

John Updike

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

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.

John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

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.

John Updike