760 Quotes by John Updike

Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible.

What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

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.

But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted.

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.

She breathed that air he’d forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

That’s the genius of the capitalist system: Either you’re rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.

Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home – one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.

I'm a dull person.