John Updike

“Vorsichtshalber haben sie das Etikett 'Kapitalismus' ersetzt durch solche, auf denen 'freie Marktwirtschaft' und 'Konsumkultur' steht, nur roch das immer noch zu sehr nach Hund-frisst-Hund, nach allzu vielen Verlierern und maßlos abrahmenden Gewinnern. Wenn man die Hunde aber isch nicht miteinander balgen lässt, dann liegen sie den ganzen Tag im Zwinger und pennen. Im Grund besteht das Problem darin, dass die Gesellschaft anständig zu sein versucht, und mit Anstand ist gegen die menschliche Natur nichts auszurichten. Nicht das Geringste. Wir sollten alle wieder Jäger und Sammler werden, dann hätten wir eine hundertprozentige Beschäftigungsquote und ein gesundes Magenknurren.”

“Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält.”

“Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.”

“Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.”

“How many more, I must ask myself,such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?”

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

“Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel.”

“His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.”

“The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.”

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.”

“...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.”

“...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.”

“Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ständig wieder gebrauchte, und mir fällt ein - eine der vergänglichen Offenbarungen der Schlaflosigkeit - dass wir, ehe wir etwas lieben, uns so etwas wie eine Nachbildung davon machen müssen, ein Erinnerungsgebilde aus flüchtigen Eindrücken und Augenblicken, das alsdann seine äussere, ziemlich langweilige Erscheinung durch eine sternbildhafte Verinnerlichung ersetzt, phosporeszierend, bequem und tragbar und am Ende unempfindlich gegen den rüden Raubbau der Wirklichkeit.”

“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”

“It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.”

“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

“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”

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”

“That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God”

“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”

“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.”

“If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

“[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.”

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”

“It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”

“We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.”

“A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers.”

“Мечтите се сбъдват; без тази възможност природата не би ни позволила да ги притежаваме.john”

“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.”

“He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.”

“Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.”

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. ”

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”

“A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body. ”

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.”

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

“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.”

“Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover’s testicles in her hand.”

“Трудность общения с остряками cостоит в том, что они смешивают то, во что верят, с тем, во что не верят лишь бы скорее произвести желанный эффект.”

“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.”