John Updike: Trending quotes (page 6)

“This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.”

“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”

“…golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”

“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”

“I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.”

“Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.”

“[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "…You're in real trouble."
"I know… But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."
"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in what?"”

“All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.”

“I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?”

“…If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.”

“This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.”

“The great thing about the dead, they make space.”

“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”

“It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.”

“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”

“God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”

“[Nelson, to Harry] "…I keep feeling hassled."
"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."”

“Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?”

“Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.”