John Updike - Years Quotes

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You reach an age when every sentence you write bumps into one you wrote thirty years ago.

John Updike
... there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

John Updike
... a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

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
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

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
[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.

John Updike
[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it.

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

John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

John Updike
Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.

John Updike