John Updike: Trending quotes

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John Updike: 480 quotes10 likes

“Like water, blood must run or grow scum.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

John Updike

Bech, A Book (1970)

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

John Updike

As quoted in “When Writers Turn to Brave New Forms” by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (24 March 1986)

“[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Janice asks.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

John Updike

The New Yorker (30 July 1990)

“If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[Thelma] "…You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”

John Updike

“Confessions of a Wild Bore” in Assorted Prose (1965)

“"Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."
"Who says?"
"I say; everybody says!"
"Why would we have a Depression?"
"Because we don't have any discipline! We're drowning in debt! We don't even own our own country any more!"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

[Harry, to Nelson]
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“…he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Weeds don't know they're weeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.”

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."
"Maybe he did. You don't get to see what a bastard I can be."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

John Updike

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