John Updike - Quodid

About

Picture of John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than 20 novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism, and children's books during his career.

Quotes from John Updike

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

—John Updike in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

love reality memory

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

patience humor boredom

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

art usefulness baby shoes apparel

My grandmother would sometimes choke on her food, and have to go out on the side porch in Shillington, where one or another member of the family would follow and hammer on her back while she clung, gagging, to the porch rail. . . . I also would choke now and then. My album of sore moments includes a memory of crouching above my tray in the Lowell House dining hall at Harvard, miserably retching at something in my throat that would not go up or down, while half-swallowed milk dribbled from my mouth and the other students at the table silently took up their trays and moved away. On the edge of asphyxia, I sympathized with them and wished that I, too, could shun me.

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

learning world reverence

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

world culture ending continuation

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

space art spirit

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience; of memory and intention and sensation.

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 towards infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises — a mother speaking downstairs.
. . . We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods.

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Books

John Updike has the following books quoted on Quodid:

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories