John Updike - The Centaur (1963)

9 Sourced Quotes

View all John Updike Quotes
The Founding Fathers... in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables — the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant.

John Updike
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

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
I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

John Updike
The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

John Updike
The Milky Way, which used to be thought of as the path by which the souls of the dead traveled to Heaven, is an optical illusion; you could never reach it. Like fog, it would always thin out around you. It's a mist of stars we make by looking the long way through the galaxy.

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
The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word "poison." "That's the weight of the Sun," Caldwell said.

John Updike
And beyond our galaxy are other galaxies, in the universe all told at least a hundred billion, each containing a hundred billion stars. Do these figures mean anything to you?

John Updike