John Updike Quotes

page 3

“[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.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

“[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.”

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

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

“[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."”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“[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?"”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.”

“"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!"”

“…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.”

“Weeds don't know they're weeds.”

“[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."”

“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.”

“[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.”

“[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.”