John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies.
[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?
...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
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.
...they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.
The 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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.
All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.
He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.
"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."
Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.
I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously...He goes grumbling away on those born with silver spoons in their mouths -- oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."
[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.