John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

John Updike
Hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

John Updike
If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

John Updike
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

John Updike
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

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
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike
Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.

John Updike
I've never much enjoyed going to plays…The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook.

John Updike
A soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe.
Of England

John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

John Updike
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.

John Updike
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

John Updike
In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.

John Updike
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

John Updike
[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "... You're in real trouble."

John Updike
[Thelma] "... You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

John Updike
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

John Updike
[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

John Updike
[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."

John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike
[Thelma] "... We're too old to keep being foolish."

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
[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
... This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.

John Updike
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

John Updike
Some sense of religious mission is part of being American.

John Updike