Quotes from John Updike
Live. Live, brothers, though there be naught but shame and failure to furnish forth your living.
— John Updike
Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.
— John Updike
She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?
— John Updike
Weeds don't know they're weeds.
— John Updike
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.
— John Updike
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?
— John Updike
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...
— John Updike
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!
— John Updike
little is more precious in an affair for a man than being welcomed into a house he has done nothing to support, or more momentous for the woman than this welcoming, this considered largesse, her house his, his on the strength of his cock alone, his cock and company, the smell and amusement and weight of him — no buying you with mortgage payments, no blackmailing you with shared children, but welcomed simply, into the walls of yourself, an admission dignified by freedom and equality.
— John Updike
Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker's face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.
— John Updike
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.
— John Updike
Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?
— John Updike