760 Quotes by John Updike

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.

Sad business, being a Negro man, always underpaid, their eyes don’t look like our eyes, bloodshot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out. Read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest man.

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 keep track of his appointments.

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

Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know.

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.

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...

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