John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love."
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
[Pru] "...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."
[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."
[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."
Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.
You don't know what you don't know.
[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. 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.
Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"
[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
"Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish."
[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..."
Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.
[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled."
Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.