John Updike Quotes Art Iminates Nature in This Not to

• Habitation
• My Books

John Updike > Quotes

Showing 121-150 of 431

"It is not difficult to deceive the offset fourth dimension, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts cool excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian."
― John Updike, Couples

"Nature may be defined equally that which exists without guilt."
― John Updike

"That's why nosotros dearest disaster, Harry sees it, puts the states back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God"
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

"Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a Television receiver remote, the average volume fits into the homo hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of encompass fabric, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback."
― John Updike

"With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks"
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

"I was fabricated to feel I could do things. If you go this feeling early and tin hold it until you lot're 15, you tend to never lose it."
― John Updike

"In fact we practise not attempt to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the cocky as the window on the world that nosotros can't behave to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or xi sent up its silent scream at the idea of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of lite, to witness and experience."
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

"Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes."
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

"There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball game, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward get-go base of operations and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America."
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

"Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints zilch merely rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a adult female who changed her heed later on."
― John Updike , Rabbit Redux

"There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its one-time-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged upward and downward by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted atomic number 26 and two-family unit brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and permit them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and practice non even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples—the branches' misty snake-shapes every bit inflexibly stock-still in these two windows as the leading of stained glass—they will non agree dorsum her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them inside herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him xxx-half dozen years to begin to believe that."
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

"Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his retention, and the forgotten scent of that narrow plastic ribbon you complect bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown downwards by a cakewalk laced with children'southward murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover information technology. No flight would reach information technology. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. And then she is through with us, and we become, beginning inside, and so exterior, junk. Flower stalks."
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

"I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me."
― John Updike

"What's beauty if it's not, in the finish, truthful? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty."
― John Updike

"The creative person brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its primal magic, its cadre of joy."
― John Updike

"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemical science of dearest was all within her, her doing. Fifty-fifty his power to wound her with fail was a power she had created and granted ..."
― John Updike

"His insides are commencement to experience sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill."
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

"His greyness accommodate makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the style of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't empathize."
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

"Human being is a machinery for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things."
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

"He showed the world what can exist done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed -- and this is where Vietnam and Republic of iraq come in, that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people volition somewhen prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go."
― John Updike, Terrorist

"Barbarism is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation."
― John Updike

"Nobody belongs to the states, except in memory." ("Grandparenting" [1994])"
― John Updike, The Maples Stories

"I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd similar to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can interruption it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool."
― John Updike

"No matter how cheerful and clean-living the day's activities accept been, when you wake in the middle of the night at that place is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything existence slightly off, wrong — y'all in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows u.s. the depth nosotros are nearly to fall into."
― John Updike

"America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy."
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

"Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese nutrient in the United States except Boston."
― John Updike

"Momentarily tuckered of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which information technology has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and verse as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open ocean."
― Updike

All Quotes | Add A Quote

Rabbit, Run
57,179 ratings
Open up Preview

Run across a Trouble?

We'd love your assistance. Let usa know what's wrong with this preview of Rabbit, Run by John Updike.

Thanks for telling usa about the problem.

Rabbit Is Rich
16,182 ratings
Open Preview

Run across a Problem?

We'd love your help. Let usa know what's wrong with this preview of Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike.

Thanks for telling u.s.a. nearly the problem.

Rabbit at Rest
14,859 ratings
Open Preview

See a Problem?

We'd dear your help. Permit us know what's wrong with this preview of Rabbit at Rest by John Updike.

Thanks for telling us virtually the problem.

Rabbit Redux
fourteen,659 ratings
Open Preview

See a Problem?

We'd love your help. Let u.s. know what'due south wrong with this preview of Rabbit Redux by John Updike.

Thanks for telling the states well-nigh the problem.

Welcome back. Just a moment while nosotros sign you in to your Goodreads account.

graynowlielinuld.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6878.John_Updike?page=5

Share this post