John Updike: Trending quotes

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John Updike: 480 quotes10 likes

“…there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

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

“One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.”

Writers on Themselves (1986)

“He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.”

On T S Matthews, and his biography of T. S. Eliot, Great Tom (1974), in The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

“[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.”

On a child doing homework near the family’s television set, in Roger’s Version (1986)

“[Nelson] "…People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”

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

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

On J. D. Salinger, from a review of his Franny and Zooey, in Studies in J. D. Salinger : Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231; also quoted in The Christian Science Monitor (August 26, 1965) and Updike's Assorted Prose (1965).

“Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“…"That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away. ] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?”

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

“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”

“Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)

“She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world…”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”

Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston (January 30, 1978)