John Updike Quotes page 2

“You don't know what you don't know.”

"We never are," he dares to say.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Nelson, re. Annabelle] …"she wants what everybody wants. She wants love."”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Nelson] "…One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."”

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[Harry having drawn at golf] The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Thelma] "…We're too old to keep being foolish."”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The past is the past," Harry goes on, "you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.”

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“… Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.”

“How to Love America and Leave it at the Same Time,” Problems and Other Stories (1979)

“[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Ronnie to Nelson] "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games."”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“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.”

“A Foreword for Younger Readers,” Assorted Prose (1965)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

The New Yorker (November 1992)

“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.”

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

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

October, A Child's Calendar (1965)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[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."”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

Salon interview (2000)

“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.”

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

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

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

John Updike book Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 2

“[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.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“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.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

John Updike book Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 5

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

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

“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.”

Writers on Themselves (1986)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“…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.”

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

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

Essay The Bliss of Golf (1982), reprinted in Golf Dreams (1996)

John Updike book Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 1

“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.”

John Updike book The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

“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?"”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

"In us. In life," she says.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“…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.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“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.”

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

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

Interview in London Observer (30 August 1987)