Quotes by John Updike

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

“In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous s...”

“I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were do...”

“There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.”

“He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.”

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”

“As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall...”

“Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”

“Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish ki...”

“I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.”

“Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.”

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

“Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.”

“Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach the...”

“The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.”

“Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.”

“While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him so much of it, evidently, that he could not...”

“The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.”

“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.”

“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”