John Updike quotes - page 6

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. (John Updike)
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. View quote
John Updike
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? View quote
John Updike
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. View quote
John Updike
We are cruel enough without meaning to be. View quote
John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. View quote
John Updike
If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. View quote
John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. View quote
John Updike
... 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. View quote
John Updike
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. View quote
John Updike
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)
[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it. View quote
John Updike
Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack? View quote
John Updike
...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs. View quote
John Updike
Late in the game as it is, you keep trying. View quote
John Updike
[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love." View quote
John Updike
[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled." View quote
John Updike
The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are. View quote
John Updike
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on. View quote
John Updike
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored. View quote
John Updike
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams. (John Updike)
You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI. View quote
John Updike
No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television. View quote
John Updike
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling. View quote
John Updike
All men are boys time is trying to outsmart. View quote
John Updike