John Updike: Being

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

“[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.”

“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”

“[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

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

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

“[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 creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.”

“Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

“[Mim, to Nelson, after discussing Annabelle's stepfather being dead] "More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was. […] Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi pollio, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice – it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell."”

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

“There's more to being a human being than having your own way.”

“Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.”

“[Nelson, re watching TV] He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials…”