760 Quotes by John Updike

She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years’ experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves.

Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.

We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths;.

Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He.

Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It’s not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.

My mother didn’t raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.

One of the cool, chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.