John Updike - Rabbit, Run (1960)

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He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

John Updike
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

John Updike
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

John Updike
Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

John Updike
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

John Updike
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

John Updike
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

John Updike
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

John Updike
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

John Updike
What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

John Updike
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

John Updike
What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.

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
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

John Updike
The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.

John Updike
But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

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

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
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
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

John Updike
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

John Updike
As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

John Updike
Your fear trills like an alarm bell you cannot shut off.

John Updike
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

John Updike