John Updike: Trending quotes (page 9)

“[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39] "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem…"”

“[Re Annabelle] …she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.”

“[Mim to Nelson] "Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid."”

“The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”

“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world…”

“…he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.”

“[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."”

“[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. […] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."”

“The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

“Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.”

“Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"”

“Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.”

“…they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.”

“These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.”

“Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.”

“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”

“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”

“It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.”