A collection of quotes and sayings by John Updike on golf, rabbit-run, love, death, poetry, new-york, art, love, life, hope, space, self, innocent, ungrateful and alive.
100 Great Quotes By John Updike For Literary Arbiters
John Updike was an eminent art critic, short story writer, novelist, literary critic and poet. He won the ‘Pulitzer Prize’ more than once and is one of the three writers to have achieved this feat - the other two being, ‘William Faulkner’ and ‘Booth Tarkington’. During his career he published more than a dozen short stories, children’s books, poetry, art and literary criticism and approximately twenty novels. Starting 1954, his stories, viewpoints, thoughts, reviews and poems appeared in ‘The New Yorker’. The most sought-after work by John Updike is his ‘Rabbit’ series that showcases the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom over several decades starting from young to death. Following is a compilation of quotes and sayings by the prolific writer which have been excerpted from his writings, books, thoughts, poems, articles, short stories, work and life. Presenting quotable quotes and thoughts by John Updike on rain, nature, freedom, power, barefoot, mask, celebrity, conspiracy, hobbies, age, wisdom, relax, sports, creativity, poetry, writing, faith, purpose, victory etc.
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership.
John Updike
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
...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.
John Updike
Growth is betrayal.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.
John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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.
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.
We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.
John Updike
The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
John Updike
[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.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
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.
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.
John Updike
It was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.
John Updike
They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike
Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt.
John Updike
Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.
John Updike
Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.
John Updike
Though old himself, he disliked old men.
John Updike
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks
John Updike
He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
John Updike
The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.
John Updike
In general the churches ... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it.
