“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“There’s no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon’ll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put ’em there, 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.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
“I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux
John Updike
Born place: in Shillington, Pennsylvania, The United States
Born date March 18, 1932
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“We drove out to Oregon City where the streets are all named after presidents in the order they were elected, so you can't get lost if you are American and you know your presidents.”
― Jessica Grant, quote from Come, Thou Tortoise
“All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
“Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies
“I stood and let the feeling of that place fill me. I have often wondered if this was what religious people feel when they pray. It is a feeling of reverence and awe, serenity and belonging. The light breeze, the smell of the forest, the rushing water, the whispering leaves—they seem to fill me, like my soul is opening up and being swept clean. It is the only thing in my life I could call spiritual.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises
“Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Alta
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Kissing Under the Mi...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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