John Updike Quotes

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.

~ John Updike

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...

~ John Updike

In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem.

~ John Updike

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 go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either.

~ John Updike

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

~ John Updike

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.

~ John Updike

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

~ John Updike

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

~ John Updike

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.

~ John Updike

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

~ John Updike

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.

~ John Updike

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.

~ John Updike

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

~ John Updike

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

~ John Updike

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.

~ John Updike

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

~ John Updike

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

~ John Updike

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.

~ John Updike

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.

~ John Updike

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

~ John Updike

Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong.

~ John Updike

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.

~ John Updike

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

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

~ John Updike

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

~ John Updike

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

~ John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

~ John Updike

One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

~ John Updike

The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

~ John Updike

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

~ John Updike

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

~ John Updike

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

~ John Updike

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

~ John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

~ John Updike

Humor is my default mode.

~ John Updike

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

~ John Updike

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

~ John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

~ John Updike

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

~ John Updike

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

~ John Updike