Quotes from John Updike

As the six, in file, passed into the poorhouse proper they clicked off glances of disdain with industrial precision.

Music affected him as women's talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener.

Nadie nos pertenece, salvo en el recuerdo.

They inhabit a kind of heaven, economical as a memory.

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.

Sad business, being a Negro man, always underpaid, their eyes don't look like our eyes, bloodshot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out. Read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest man.

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.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of societies unusables - the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant.

The six o'clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald men plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it's the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they're aiming and it's a big round nothing.

Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents' swift death Piet had no margin. He lived tight against his skin, and his flattish face wore a look of tension. Also, his European sense of order insisted that he place his children in Christendom.

Their neighbors in Penn Villas are strangers, transients – accountants, salesmen, supervisors, adjusters – people whose lives to them are passing can and the shouts of unseen children.

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.

We all rather live under wraps, don't we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn't it?

Having suffered under their parents' rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games.

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.

He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, "Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything.

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.

We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.

be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

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

He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes.

Freud is like God; you make it true.

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.