John Updike quotes - page 7

He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it. (John Updike)
I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode? View quote
John Updike
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again. View quote
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence. View quote
John Updike
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell. View quote
John Updike
...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so. View quote
John Updike
He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face? View quote
John Updike
One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator's point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented. View quote
John Updike
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. View quote
John Updike
His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. View quote
John Updike
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon. (John Updike)
She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world... View quote
John Updike
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way. View quote
John Updike
Like water, blood must run or grow scum. View quote
John Updike
He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on. View quote
John Updike
If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence. View quote
John Updike
[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it." View quote
John Updike
[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat. View quote
John Updike
One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. View quote
John Updike
[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here. View quote
John Updike
...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives. (John Updike)
He's not that young, he's turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he's married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn't know better. View quote
John Updike
[Re Annabelle] ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is. View quote
John Updike
The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience. View quote
John Updike
These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. View quote
John Updike