760 Quotes by John Updike

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.