He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. 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

John Updike Quotes

The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him.

— John Updike

To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom – some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my life, is the reason why I write.

— John Updike

Every novel, after all, invites us into a world that is, at first, strange; our gradual and selective orientation to its furniture and manners imitates the infant’s happy accommodations to his dawning environment.

— John Updike

He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.

— John Updike

But it was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.

— John Updike

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

— John Updike

Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.

— John Updike

In her rare moods of liberation she held for him the danger that she would disclose great riches within herself, showing him the depths of loss frozen over by their marriage.

— John Updike

Since the start of their affair he was always running, hurrying, creating time where no time had been needed before; he had become an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life. He had given up smoking; he wanted his kisses to taste clean.

— John Updike

Just yesterday, it seems to him, she’s stopped being pretty.

— John Updike

The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald men plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing.

— John Updike

Their neighbors in Penn Villas are strangers, transients – accountants, salesmen, supervisors, adjusters – people whose lives to them are passing can and the shouts of unseen children.

— John Updike

He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. 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

He lay on his back like a town suspended from a steeple. He.

— John Updike

Do you realize there isn’t a Gentile character in here who isn’t slavishly in love with some Jew?

— John Updike

Her son is poisonous, Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort she’s brought destruction into the world.

— John Updike

Pornography and its slightly more demure cousin, advertising, present an ideal world, and the claims of the ideal strain and stress imperfect reality.

— John Updike

Our army was still out of reach on the remote frontiers, and could not be withdrawn, during midwinter, in time for this military operation. Indeed, the General had never suggested such a withdrawal. He knew that had this been possible, the inhabitants on our distant frontiers would have been immediately exposed to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians.

— John Updike

They inhabit a kind of heaven, economical as a memory.

— John Updike

Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order.

— John Updike
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