760 Quotes by John Updike

We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. into the nether world.

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today’s pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

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.

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.

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.

Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.

I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer’s career and that we shouldn’t worry about what we’re not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

Figure out where you’re going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.