Search quotes

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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
fffe891	Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.			John Updike
f6ad47b	You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.			John Updike
79ff904	The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.			John Updike
8aa8249	We shed skins in life, to keep living.			John Updike
5282404	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
cc95194	Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the			John Updike
205b52f	What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings.			John Updike
7dbbd51	I drive my car to supermarket, The way I take is superhigh, A superlot is where I park it, And Super Suds are what I buy. Supersalesmen sell me tonic - Super-Tone-O, for Relief. The planes I ride are supersonic. In trains, I like the Super Chief. Supercilious men and women Call me superficial - me, Who so superbly learned to swim in Supercolossality. Superphosphate-fed foods feed me; Superservice keeps me new.			John Updike
e4dd7dc	No act is so private it does not seek applause.		egotism sex sexuality	John Updike
d916d52	It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.			John Updike
85bb945	it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.			John Updike
d020a48	Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."		comedy driving	John Updike
f3aa37a	He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn't know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.			John Updike
b7fe2c6	I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened.			John Updike
62c38b3	A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavi..			John Updike
d0e992d	How many more, I must ask myself, such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?			John Updike
d794748	No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and			John Updike
236dbfc	I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.			John Updike
2a90479	Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.		pastry-cart pigs	John Updike
dae5920	On being conscious of being a writer: As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the "successfu..		self-consciousness self-importance writing	John Updike
084ddb5	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 glowin..			John Updike
96a27f1	They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.		reputation	John Updike
8822f7c	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.		rape	John Updike
82e2118	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
824fb71	Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.			John Updike
70f370d	Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.			John Updike
c25afbd	Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.			John Updike
bd85d34	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
f1ae26b	Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.			John Updike
fe527d5	Though old himself, he disliked old men.			John Updike
8e8ed8f	And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?		identity life-philosophy philosophy science	John Updike
930f89d	With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks			John Updike
6e9306e	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..		life self-consciousness	John Updike
ab2d933	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
83016c1	His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.		ceremony costume nelson-angstrom vulnerability	John Updike
d8c796b	The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.			John Updike
76f3178	First snow: it came this year late in November.			John Updike
9e0bfac	Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God's grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by ..		art martin-johnson-heade	John Updike
23ef9ad	Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably--he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words--misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.			John Updike
98189a7	Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of childre..			John Updike
0a3567a	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
d5873d7	And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how t..			John Updike
b1447b9	When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,---people imagine that because a thing is..			John Updike
f75c865	The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.		chinese-food hypocrisy meat vegetarianism	John Updike

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