760 Quotes by John Updike

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.

Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill’s shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class. Jill’s family had a servant, and it takes her some nights to understand that dirtied dishes do not clear and clean themselves by magic, but have to be carried and washed.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

The fucking world is running out of gas.

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.