John Updike - Rabbit Redux (1971)

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

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
Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything.

John Updike
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

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
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
That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.

John Updike
There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

John Updike
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.

John Updike
Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general.

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
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

John Updike
Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.

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

John Updike