John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
"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."
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."
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?"
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.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
[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?
You don't know what you don't know.
Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.
[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."
[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.
[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."
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.
[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love."
[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."
This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.
[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."
[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."