760 Quotes by John Updike

With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks.

The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible – think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is – its irresistible charm – a fire.

You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on – the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It’s rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won’t quite catch fire, isn’t it?

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.

The muttered hint, “Remember, you have a stroke here,” freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that’s when empires start to decline.

Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility.

This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say – ‘One world at a time’?