Quotes from John Updike

Men are absolutely shits, but we get them in the end because we can suffer better. A woman can outsuffer a man every time.

Poor old Nixon, even his own commissions beat on him. What the hell can he do? He can't go into every ghetto and fix the plumbing himself. He can't give every copped-out junkie a million dollars and a Ph.D. Nixon, who's Nixon? He's just a typical flatfooted Chamber of Commerce type who lucked his way into the hot seat and is so dumb he thinks it's good luck. Let the poor bastard alone, he's trying to bore us to death so we won't commit suicide.

They had been drinking. In the society of Tarbox there was no invitation more flattering than to share, like this, another couple's intimacy, to partake in their humorous déshabille, their open quarrels and implicit griefs.

Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch

children are not our creations but our guests, people who enter the world by our invitation but with their smiles and dispositions already prepared in some mysterious other room.

Not until midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion - a bent rib, as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum had it - but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters.

Dignitaries look alike, always dressed in mourning.

Skeeter stands and tries to comprehend this man. "Trouble with you, he sees, "you still cluttered up with common sense. Common sense is bullshit, man. It gets you through the days all right, but it leaves you alone at night. It keeps you from knowing.

He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?

Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.

A blank check. A woman is blank until you fuck her. Everything is blank until you fuck it. Us and Vietnam, fucking and being fucked, blood is wisdom.

The slither of sheers as she rotates her body is a silver music, sheets of pale noise extending outward unresisted by space. There was a grip he used to have on her, his right hand cupping her skull through her hair and his left hand on her breasts gathering them together, so the nipples were an inch apart. The grip is still there.

It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time.

It's five-sixths muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're stymied. You're just going through the motions.

He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.

My poor dumb mutt of a wife throws a better piece of ass backwards than you can manage frontwards

Sweetie, the bluebird has flown. We're too young to sit around the rest of our lives waiting for it to fly back in the window. It won't. It can't fly backwards.' He was using his hands again in that disagreeable stagey way, and Ruth was angered by the flicker of conceit in his expression when he struck upon the image of the bluebird fying backwards - a piece of animation on the screen of his face.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

We are most alive when we're in love.