Quotes from John Updike

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

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.

Driving is boring, Rabbit pontificates, but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.

We shed skins in life, to keep living.

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

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

Whatever men make, she says, what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings.

I drive my car to supermarket, The way I take is superhigh, A superlot is where I park it, And Super Suds are what I buy. Supersalesmen sell me tonic - Super-Tone-O, for Relief. The planes I ride are supersonic. In trains, I like the Super Chief. Supercilious men and women Call me superficial - me, Who so superbly learned to swim in Supercolossality. Superphosphate-fed foods feed me; Superservice keeps me new. Who would dare to supersede me, Super-super-superwho?

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.