John Updike - God Quotes

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God is a word, however problematical, we do not have to look up in the dictionary. We seem to have its acquaintance from birth.

John Updike
God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

John Updike
Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

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
[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
[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
[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
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

John Updike
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

John Updike
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

John Updike
The most miraculous thing is happening. The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. "Mr. Kohler, What kind of God is showing through, exactly?"

John Updike
And I'm not sure it isn't a bit heretical of you to toss the fact of God in with a lot of other facts. Even Aquinas, I think, didn't postulate a God Who could be hauled kicking and screaming out from some laboratory closet, over behind the blackboard.

John Updike