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“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”

John Updike

"They Thought They Were Better" in TIME magazine (21 July 1980) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924295,00.html

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”

John Updike

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

John Updike book Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Source: Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

“It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.”

John Updike book Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 2

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

John Updike book Rabbit Is Rich

Source: Rabbit Is Rich

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

John Updike book The Centaur

Source: The Centaur (1963), Ch. 4

“If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

John Updike

Source: A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“… hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

John Updike

“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 book Rabbit Redux

Source: Rabbit Redux

“[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”

John Updike

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

“For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.”

John Updike

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

“[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)