Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths;.”

— John Updike

352. “All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.”

— John Updike

353. “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

354. “He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn’t been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.”

— John Updike

355. “Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.”

— John Updike

356. “But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted.”

— John Updike

357. “He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.”

— John Updike

358. “While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him – so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.”

— John Updike

359. “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.”

— John Updike

360. “That’s the genius of the capitalist system: Either you’re rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.”

— John Updike

361. “She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?”

— John Updike

362. “This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say – ‘One world at a time’?”

— John Updike

363. “Live. Live, brothers, though there be naught but shame and failure to furnish forth your living.”

— John Updike

364. “What’s this about you being married?” “Well, I was. Still am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this – these trees, this pavement – was life, the real and only thing.”

— John Updike

365. “Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.”

— John Updike

366. “The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”

— John Updike

367. “All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years’ experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves.”

— John Updike

368. “Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.”

— John Updike

369. “Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors.”

— John Updike

370. “Pornography and its slightly more demure cousin, advertising, present an ideal world, and the claims of the ideal strain and stress imperfect reality.”

— John Updike

371. “I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.”

— John Updike

372. “Since the start of their affair he was always running, hurrying, creating time where no time had been needed before; he had become an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life. He had given up smoking; he wanted his kisses to taste clean.”

— John Updike

373. “But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.”

— John Updike

374. “School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. I am a paid keeper of societies unusables – the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant.”

— John Updike

375. “Just yesterday, it seems to him, she’s stopped being pretty.”

— John Updike

376. “Their neighbors in Penn Villas are strangers, transients – accountants, salesmen, supervisors, adjusters – people whose lives to them are passing can and the shouts of unseen children.”

— John Updike

377. “He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. 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

378. “He lay on his back like a town suspended from a steeple. He.”

— John Updike

379. “To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom – some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my life, is the reason why I write.”

— John Updike

380. “Our army was still out of reach on the remote frontiers, and could not be withdrawn, during midwinter, in time for this military operation. Indeed, the General had never suggested such a withdrawal. He knew that had this been possible, the inhabitants on our distant frontiers would have been immediately exposed to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians.”

— John Updike

381. “Every novel, after all, invites us into a world that is, at first, strange; our gradual and selective orientation to its furniture and manners imitates the infant’s happy accommodations to his dawning environment.”

— John Updike

382. “They inhabit a kind of heaven, economical as a memory.”

— John Updike

383. “He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.”

— John Updike

384. “Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order.”

— John Updike

385. “Do you realize there isn’t a Gentile character in here who isn’t slavishly in love with some Jew?”

— John Updike

386. “The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.”

— John Updike

387. “But it was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.”

— John Updike

388. “Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”

— John Updike

389. “Her son is poisonous, Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort she’s brought destruction into the world.”

— John Updike

390. “The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald men plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing.”

— John Updike

391. “The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him.”

— John Updike

392. “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

— John Updike