John Updike: Trending quotes (page 12)

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“[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Memory

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”

John Updike

On completing a long novel, New York Times (7 April 1968)

Time

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Death , People , World , Feeling

“Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Life , Hell

“Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Feeling

“[Annabelle] "…health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

People , Health , World , Dead

“Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

World

“…the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

Beauty , Game , Grass , Waiting

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 4

War , World , Sex , Madness

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”

John Updike

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

Life , Religion

“[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Life

“Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Pain , World , Beauty , Way

“Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

People

“[Nelson, re watching TV] He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials…”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Feeling , Intelligence , Patience

“You are cynical.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

"Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while, you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that matters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge.'"
Rabbit Redux (1969)

“I feared his visit. I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled—Hegel and his avatars—were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there.”

John Updike

The Astronomer by John Updike from Pigeon Feathers: and other stories p. 125 1959, 1962 Ballantine Books

Home , Time , Beauty , Universe

“Man is an animal, but a social animal. Society for its manifold blessings asks in exchange sacrifice and compromise. Concession is the world's walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

John Updike

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)

Animals , World , Madness