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Top John Updike Quotes

Browse top 149 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by John Updike.

Favorite John Updike Quotes

1. "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?" ~ John Updike
2. "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 panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy." ~ John Updike
3. "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
4. "A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world." ~ John Updike
5. "If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money." ~ John Updike
6. "If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem." ~ John Updike
7. "Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them." ~ John Updike
8. "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
9. "Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ständig wieder gebrauchte, und mir fällt ein - eine der vergänglichen Offenbarungen der Schlaflosigkeit - dass wir, ehe wir etwas lieben, uns so etwas wie eine Nachbildung davon machen müssen, ein Erinnerungsgebilde aus flüchtigen Eindrücken und Augenblicken, das alsdann seine äussere, ziemlich langweilige Erscheinung durch eine sternbildhafte Verinnerlichung ersetzt, phosporeszierend, bequem und tragbar und am Ende unempfindlich gegen den rüden Raubbau der Wirklichkeit." ~ John Updike
10. "Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation." ~ John Updike
11. "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
12. "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 heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers." ~ John Updike
13. "Growth is betrayal." ~ John Updike
14. "Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält." ~ John Updike
15. "Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.'In einer Hinsicht. Aber der größte 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 vögeln, Babys zu kriegen und zu sterben." ~ John Updike
16. "I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name"Though authors are a dreadful clanTo be avoided if you can,I'd like to meet the Indian,M. Anantanarayanan.I picture him as short and tan.We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan.I'd say, with admirable elan ,"Ah, Anantanarayanan --I've heard of you. The Times once ranA notice on your novel, anUnusual tale of God and Man."And AnantanarayananWould seat me on a lush divanAnd read his name -- that sumptuous spanOf 'a's and 'n's more lovely than"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan" --Aloud to me all day. I planHenceforth to be an ardent fanof Anantanarayanan --M. Anantanarayanan." ~ John Updike
17. "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
18. "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 the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance." ~ John Updike
19. "I love you" he says."That means nothing from you.Have it have it you say:how?will you marry me?""I'd love to""You'd love to do any thing.What about your wife?What about the boy you already have?""I don't know""Will you divorce her?No,you love being married to her too....You love being married to everybody....What can you make up your mind what you want to do?""I can't...I don't know""How would you support me?How many wives can you support?Your jobs are a joke....You aren't worth hiring...may be once you could play basketball....but you can't do anything now!!!What the hell do you think the world is?""please have the baby"he says "you got to have it""Why?why do you care""I don't know..I don't know any of these answers..All I know is what feels right,You feel right to me....Sometimes Janice used to,Sometimes nothing does" ~ John Updike
20. "My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy." ~ John Updike
21. "People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep." ~ John Updike
22. "[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it." ~ John Updike
23. "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 the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes." ~ John Updike
24. "We are most alive when we're in love." ~ John Updike
25. "To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client." ~ John Updike
26. "The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it." ~ John Updike
27. "We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one." ~ John Updike
28. "Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea." ~ John Updike
29. "How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?" ~ John Updike
30. "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
31. "Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath." ~ John Updike
32. "The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started." ~ John Updike
33. "Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more." ~ John Updike
34. "What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?" ~ John Updike
35. "...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
36. "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
37. "To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given." ~ John Updike
38. "How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation." ~ John Updike
39. "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
40. "In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves." ~ John Updike
41. "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
42. "The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires." ~ John Updike
43. "As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world..." ~ John Updike
44. "One does not go to Moscow to get fat." ~ John Updike
45. "Neutrinos, they are very small.They have no charge and have no massAnd do not interact at all.The earth is just a silly ballTo them, through which they simply pass,Like dustmaids down a drafty hallOr 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 tallAnd painless guillotines they fallDown through our heads into the grass.At night, they enter at NepalAnd pierce the lover and his lassFrom underneath the bed—you callIt wonderful; I call it crass." ~ John Updike
46. "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
47. "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding." ~ John Updike
48. "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
49. "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 to be grown-up." ~ John Updike
50. "Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt." ~ John Updike
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Today's Quote

Education and professions are important."
Author: Anyaele Sam Chiyson

What Did John Updike Talk About?

Wit
Thin
Ear
Here
Per
Hen
Hey
Con
Lit
Thou
She
Tan
Ten
Does
Ring
Less
King
Act
Son
End
Old
Lie
Self
Sin
Side
Child
Though
Cat
Body
Light
Read
Once
Use
Mad
Die
Each
Air
Ally
Able
Win
Rate
Bee
Ape
Era
Off
Sit
Year
Seem
Rain
Star

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