John Updike: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”

“At last, small witches, goblins, hags,
And pirates armed with paper bags,
Their costumes hinged on safety pins,
Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.”

“Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.”

“Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.”

“[Nelson] "… I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."
"What are those?" Janice is truly interested; she has never heard a man spell it out.
He makes a cross evasive face. "You know – don't play naïve. Reassurance. Affection. Make the guy think he's great even if he isn't."”

“When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.”

“You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.”

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

“When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.”

“No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.”

“Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.”

“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”

“[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.”

“All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.”

“He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.”

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

“Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.”