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John Updike: 480 quotes10 likes

“Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.”

John Updike

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

“Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.”

John Updike

John Updike, reviewing The Only Problem in New Yorker, July 23, 1984.

“His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.”

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.”

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.”

John Updike

“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

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

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

John Updike

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.”

John Updike

London Observer (25 March 1979)

“Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

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

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

John Updike

Life Magazine (September 1986)

“An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?”

John Updike

Salon interview (2000)

“Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)