Quotes from John Updike

Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren't the maze women's were, for the pee to find its way through.

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

We love too late... Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or give back speech truly?

The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.

Her son is poisonous, Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort she's brought destruction into the world.

A jelen a paradicsom, ám az agyunk nem engedi, hogy sokáig éljünk benne.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

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.

Since the start of their affair he was always running, hurrying, creating time where no time had been needed before; he had become an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life. He had given up smoking; he wanted his kisses to taste clean.

What's this about you being married?" "Well, I was. Still am." He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It's like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.

Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.

Pornography and its slightly more demure cousin, advertising, present an ideal world, and the claims of the ideal strain and stress imperfect reality.

God save us from ever ending, though billions have./ The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,/ small beads of ego, bright with appetite,/ whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,/ bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf/ unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.

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.

The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened.

Our army was still out of reach on the remote frontiers, and could not be withdrawn, during midwinter, in time for this military operation. Indeed, the General had never suggested such a withdrawal. He knew that had this been possible, the inhabitants on our distant frontiers would have been immediately exposed to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians.

The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.

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?

But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.

Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält.