Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
668321c It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. John Updike
7cb6c2a Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. John Updike
183fe11 Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. time John Updike
c04f700 If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. inspirational John Updike
98c3996 I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. John Updike
3d45cad How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? John Updike
610c5ad We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living. John Updike
72f6588 The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. teotwawki rabbit-angstrom cynicism John Updike
e74ff36 Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath. John Updike
7fd42f2 You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. John Updike
1625c31 Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supp.. John Updike
da76d90 But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. John Updike
fa59787 What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? John Updike
134e9bc We are cruel enough without meaning to be. rabbit-angstrom cruelty John Updike
c78ae7a Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? death life self John Updike
56b4567 There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. John Updike
9b6553b If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. humor john-updike comic John Updike
81fd9a6 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
4494666 Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. wickedness John Updike
fb28c3a 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
075f63a Growth is betrayal. growth John Updike
902231d I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards. John Updike
6ed84b0 I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. John Updike
f764839 It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. John Updike
a874bc6 Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly. parents John Updike
d8cc36d What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. thirty thirtysomething John Updike
d62c70d Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life's singularity -- the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us .. life singularity John Updike
34553b1 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. politics woodrow-wilson republicans John Updike
e1ebb83 But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. reasons John Updike
f633089 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
a6f5916 A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body. John Updike
b6171df The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need s.. sleep religion self-consciousness John Updike
0df486e We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies. John Updike
9185732 Sex is like money; only too much is enough. money sex passion love power John Updike
33a7fc7 All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. John Updike
0e0878c The fucking world is running out of gas. rabbit-angstrom cynicism John Updike
e2c2931 Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your finger.. death-and-dying short-story John Updike
fba7e52 The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't--whichever seems likelier to win an effect. humor truth comedian humorist insincerity belief John Updike
be93517 The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. relationships women John Updike
4f8eb7b How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation. John Updike
528d838 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. life parenthood John Updike
b1899b2 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
80914ca Writing ... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in pan.. writing John Updike
d3bfe34 As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world... John Updike
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ▲ ▼