John Updike

“Nadie nos pertenece, salvo en el recuerdo.”

“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

“I like middles. . . It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

“He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed -- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in, that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go.”

“Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.”

“Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

“There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.”

“A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking.”

“Neutrinos, they are very small.They have no charge and have no massAnd do not interact at all.The earth is just a silly ballTo them, through which they simply pass,Like dustmaids down a drafty hallOr photons through a sheet of glass.They snub the most exquisite gas,Ignore the most substantial wall,Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,Insult the stallion in his stall,And, scorning barriers of class,Infiltrate you and me. Like tallAnd painless guillotines they fallDown through our heads into the grass.At night, they enter at NepalAnd pierce the lover and his lassFrom underneath the bed—you callIt wonderful; I call it crass.”

“What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.”

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

“There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.”

“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.”

“It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.”

“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.”

“In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.”

“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.”

“All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.”

“The cloud of the consommé’s warmth enveloped her face and revived her poise. In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace.”

“If Rabbit knew a way to clone an adult sized vagina, Rabbit would clone it, have sex with it, then clone an arm to the side of that vagina so he could carry it with him everywhere he went like a big, fuzzy key chain.”

“It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.”

“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.”

“There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples—the branches’ misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass—they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that.”

“Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humour of her Jew. Ken looked lika a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford laywer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns, but no mysteries. (...) He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine.”

“I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”

“The fucking world is running out of gas.”

“The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Springby John UpdikeWhen winter's glaze is lifted from the greens,And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing,Triumphantly the stifled golfer preensIn cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.This year, he vows, his head will steady be,His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal;And so they are, until upon the teeBefall the old contortions of the real.So, too, the tennis-player, torpid fromHibernal months of television sports,Perfects his serve and feels his knees becomeSheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss,Which shall be high, so that the racket faceShall at a certain angle sweep acrossThe floated sphere with gutty strings—an ace!The mind's eye sees it all until uponThe courts of life the faulty way we playedIn other summers rolls back with the sun.Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.”

“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...”

“Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.”

“No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.”

“One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.”

“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”

“as souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven”

“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.”

“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.”

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

“Growth is betrayal.”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. ”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. ”

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

“The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.”

“I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.”

“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.”

“There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head.”

“...I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened.”

“Wir wissen eben nicht, was einer tun sollte, wir haben nicht mehr wir früher Antworten parat; wir wursteln uns bloß weiter durch und versuchen, nicht nachzudenken.”

“Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.'In einer Hinsicht. Aber der größte Teil der Menschheit ist so. Weil es sonst zu schwer zu ertragen ist, Mensch zu sein. Im Gegensatz zu den Tieren wissen wir zu viel. Sie, die anderen Tiere, wissen gerade genug, um ihren Job zu machen und zu sterben. Um zu essen, zu schlafen, zu vögeln, Babys zu kriegen und zu sterben.”