John Updike > Quotes

“Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.”
― John Updike

“They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.”
― John Updike

“His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“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

“Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle"

The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then violins
vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.”
― John Updike

“Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt.”
― John Updike

“Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed—you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.”
― John Updike

“That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

“With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say—‘One world at a time’?”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.”
― John Updike , Rabbit Redux

“I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“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, Rabbit Redux

“Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...”
― John Updike

“Though old himself, he disliked old men.”
― John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration

“Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples—the branches’ misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass—they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”
― John Updike

“Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed -- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in, that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go.”
― John Updike, Terrorist

“What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”
― John Updike

“And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?”
― John Updike, Toward the End of Time