760 Quotes by John Updike

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.

Don't read your reviews,A*M*E*R*I*C*A:you are the only land.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

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. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

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