John Updike Quotes

I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated c...

Without death, now, there couldn’t be life. Health, he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back...

But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it...

A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and...

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world a...

Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.'In einer Hinsicht. Aber der größte Teil der Menschheit ist so. Weil es sonst zu schwer zu ertragen ist, Mensch zu sein. Im Gegensatz zu den Tieren wissen wir zu viel. Si...

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 illus...

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

Come here, he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him. No, Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere...

First snow: it came this year late in November.

For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini,...

Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.

Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do b...

He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with th...

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes...

He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, o...