Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker’s face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.

— John Updike

John Updike Quotes

I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.

— John Updike

Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.

— John Updike

Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors.

— John Updike

A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.

— John Updike

Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back.

— John Updike

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

— John Updike

We love too late... Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or give back speech truly?

— John Updike

The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.

— John Updike

What’s this about you being married?” “Well, I was. Still am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this – these trees, this pavement – was life, the real and only thing.

— John Updike

You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on – the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It’s rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won’t quite catch fire, isn’t it?

— John Updike

But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.

— John Updike

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.

— John Updike

School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. I am a paid keeper of societies unusables – the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant.

— John Updike

Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

— John Updike

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
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