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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1809d2a | Martyrs of a sort they were, these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoat, draining blackberry brandy from a paper bag as he sat on his bench in Kazmierczak Square, risking nightly death by exposure; martyrs too of a sort were the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts, risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel love--all sacrificing the outer world to the inner, proclaiming wi.. | John Updike | ||
| a8c5add | Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death. | airport foreshadowing memento-mori music rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| 2be0709 | While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him -- so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments. | jealousy | John Updike | |
| 426f766 | But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted. | John Updike | ||
| 0124fcf | SO THEY PROVIDED JAILS CALLED SCHOOLS, EQUIPPED WITH TORTURES CALLED AN EDUCATION." --John Updike" | Jonathan Shaw | ||
| ee81e1a | I think "taste" is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves." | taste writing | John Updike | |
| d0e7f9b | For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art - John Updike's phrase - that we were just beginning. | Dani Shapiro | ||
| edade7e | I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next.. | damnation death eternal-damnation god hell poor religion | John Updike | |
| 6ca21aa | Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. | vagueness | John Updike | |
| 813f06e | Die christliche Sitte, trage aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskunstler gilt, der von der Buhne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhalt. | John Updike | ||
| 0b64143 | Vorsichtshalber haben sie das Etikett 'Kapitalismus' ersetzt durch solche, auf denen 'freie Marktwirtschaft' und 'Konsumkultur' steht, nur roch das immer noch zu sehr nach Hund-frisst-Hund, nach allzu vielen Verlierern und masslos abrahmenden Gewinnern. Wenn man die Hunde aber isch nicht miteinander balgen lasst, dann liegen sie den ganzen Tag im Zwinger und pennen. Im Grund besteht das Problem darin, dass die Gesellschaft anstandig zu sein.. | John Updike | ||
| 8d39e59 | Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.' In einer Hinsicht. Aber der grosste Teil der Menschheit ist so. Weil es sonst zu schwer zu ertragen ist, Mensch zu sein. Im Gegensatz zu den Tieren wissen wir zu viel. Sie, die anderen Tiere, wissen gerade genug, um ihren Job zu machen und zu sterben. Um zu essen, zu schlafen, zu vogeln, Babys zu kriegen und zu sterben. | John Updike | ||
| 7fe6121 | Wir wissen eben nicht, was einer tun sollte, wir haben nicht mehr wir fruher Antworten parat; wir wursteln uns bloss weiter durch und versuchen, nicht nachzudenken. | John Updike | ||
| 0d281c8 | Trudnost' obshcheniia s ostriakami costoit v tom, chto oni smeshivaiut to, vo chto veriat, s tem, vo chto ne veriat lish' by skoree proizvesti zhelannyi effekt. | John Updike | ||
| 3cc1f91 | Without death, now, there couldn't be life. Health," he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, "is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body." | John Updike | ||
| 34d384e | When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads...But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. | John Updike | ||
| 7d40504 | 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. | life living | John Updike | |
| 2e95d87 | Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old. | John Updike | ||
| 88984f5 | Back From Vacation" "Back from vacation", the barber announces, or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan. They are amazed to find the workaday world still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs, their customers having hardly missed them, and there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders, the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas, the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved in foreign languages,.. | John Updike | ||
| 9cf6017 | There's no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon'll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put 'em there, 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 | ||
| 9d75d04 | Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge. | middle-age | John Updike | |
| 5243c3b | I don't recall inclement weather on a fair day. | john updike | ||
| 19a0dca | Music affected him as women's talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener. | John Updike | ||
| 450df98 | It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt. | John Updike | ||
| ebb1302 | Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree? | John Updike | ||
| 61c87d2 | You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together. | John Updike | ||
| 30d16f4 | be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. | John Updike | ||
| 66f550a | Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography. | John Updike | ||
| b4a8b50 | Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. | John Updike | ||
| ef947f9 | Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He | John Updike | ||
| c21fcc5 | What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd. | old-people revenge | John Updike | |
| db60a6c | Margaret Atwood writes: "As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere." Nearing death, John Updike reflects on A life poured into words--apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed." | James Gleick | ||
| 408fb34 | Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors. | drinking drunkenness old-people | John Updike | |
| cd7136d | Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back. | John Updike | ||
| 23a1312 | Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. --John Updike | Jennifer Wolfe | ||
| ba71067 | A century of progressivism bears the fruit of Hitler; our own super-technology breeds witches and warlocks from the loins of engineers. --JOHN UPDIKE | I.D.E. Thomas | ||
| 1a6064a | We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; | John Updike | ||
| c85b678 | Nothing feels worse than other people's good times. | John Updike | ||
| 99a34cf | Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility. | John Updike | ||
| e30a2a5 | She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed? | John Updike | ||
| abedaab | That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be. | John Updike | ||
| 9ada6dd | this country since 1865 has an unenviable record for political violence. Four presidents, plus the attempts on Truman and both Roosevelts--as you know, Teddy was actually wounded, in his unsuccessful campaign in 1912--not to mention Huey Long. There isn't a country west of the Balkans with any kind of the same record. The Prime Ministers of England go everywhere with a single bodyguard. | John Updike | ||
| 4fdb8d0 | We all rather live under wraps, don't we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn't it? | nature | John Updike | |
| b8557a3 | Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and t.. | John Updike |