John UpdikeThere is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. ✨ John Updike (2010). Rabbit, Run, p.37, Random House371Reflection
John UpdikeI'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into anothe… ▶361LifeReadingThought
John UpdikeThere was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to mak… ▶372Hope
John UpdikeLife is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.363Life
John UpdikeRevolution is just one crowd taking power from another. ✨ John Updike (2003). Rabbit, run ; Rabbit redux331Politics
John UpdikeAmericans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. ✨ 1975 A Month of Sundays, ch.18.342Hope
John UpdikeI assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of d… ▶342Sadness
John UpdikeI must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful a… ▶354HopeTruth
John UpdikeWriting criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. ✨ Hugging the Shore foreword (1984)377Reading
John UpdikeThere 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. ✨ John Updike (2012). Self-Consciousness: M… ▶322Time
John UpdikeWickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. ✨ John Updike (1984). The witches of Eastwick, Fawcett311Politics
John UpdikeWhat is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? ✨ John Updike (1996). Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stori… ▶356ReadingTime
John UpdikeAdversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.312Death
John UpdikeBut 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 (2010). Rabbit, Run, p.35, … ▶356Love
John UpdikeAn old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It p… ▶378LifeReflectionThought
John UpdikeYou cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands. ✨ John Updike (2011). Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, p.479, Random House379Politics
John UpdikeEach morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. ✨… ▶302Hope
John UpdikeThe 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. … ▶335PhilosophyReading
John UpdikeI want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ✨ FaceBook post byJohn Updike from Dec 22, 2013379Reading
John UpdikeHemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.379Reflection
John UpdikeStudents present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.335Time
John UpdikeHoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull. ✨ John Updike (2012). Collected Poems, 1953-1993, p.85, Knopf313Love
John UpdikeLife is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.357Life
John UpdikeThe 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 cryin… ▶346Sadness
John UpdikeLife is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.369LifeReading
John UpdikeThe first breathe of adultery is the freest. ✨ Couples ch. 5 (1968)347Politics
John UpdikeYou always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.303Love
John UpdikeWe are most alive when we're in love.358LifeLove
John UpdikeThe true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. ✨ FaceBook post byJohn Updike from Dec 31, 2013347HumanityLifeReading
John UpdikeGolf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere togeth… ▶369Life
