John Updike Quotes

..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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.

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

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.

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.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.