John Updike - Time Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

View all John Updike Quotes
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

John Updike
Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

John Updike
My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

John Updike
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

John Updike
You need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won't pull apart, and that's what the ultimate particles are — knots in space-time. You can't make a knot in two dimensions because there's no over or under.

John Updike
His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

John Updike
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

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
[Nelson] "... People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

John Updike
If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.

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

John Updike
An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?

John Updike
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

John Updike
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.

John Updike
[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.

John Updike
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

John Updike