John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

32 Sourced Quotes

View all John Updike Quotes
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
All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

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

John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

John Updike
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

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
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.

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
College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they're getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don't give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It's all phony, they're there because parents don't want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. 'My little Johnny's at Haavahd.'

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

John Updike
Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.

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
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
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
Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.

John Updike
You don't stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That's how stupid we are.

John Updike
He's not that young, he's turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he's married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn't know better.

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
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

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

John Updike