John Updike Quotes
John Updike Quotes. Below is a collection of famous John Updike quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by John Updike. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real suc...
By John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
By John Updike
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?
By John Updike
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.
By John Updike
Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to describe the sex act as our descent, or adventure, into a primordial or strange world, having very little to do with how we look in suits or what our educations have been. It's a well of darkness, as it were, that leaves you refreshed.
By John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
By John Updike
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
By John Updike
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
By John Updike
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.
By John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
By John Updike
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.
By John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
By John Updike
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea
By John Updike
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
By John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
By John Updike
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
By John Updike
There are times when fear is good It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain.
By John Updike
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.
By John Updike
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
By John Updike
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
By John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
By John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.
By John Updike