760 Quotes by John Updike

A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.

--also on June 22nd JB vetoes the Homestead Bill...This bill, which proposes to give him ("the honest poor man,"...) land at an almost nominal price, out of the property of the government, will go far to demoralize the people and repress this noble spirit of independence. It may introduce among us those pernicious social theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries.

Ogni cosa sotto il cielo finisce, e se si ritiene che la temporalità ne infici il valore, allora nulla che sia reale ottiene mai il successo.

She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt’s dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins’ oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy’s idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

We are most alive when we're in love.