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

patience humor boredom

About John Updike

Portrait 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...

More quotations from John Updike

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

We are most alive when we're in love.

The deaths of others carry us off bit by bit, until there will be nothing left; and this, too, will be, in a way, a mercy.

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.

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.

More quotations tagged with “boredom”

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

attention politics USA boredom television

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

—Samuel Butler

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

privacy boredom speech conversation disclosure interest

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal in life is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally with beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank God for letting you have the ride.

—Jenkin Lloyd Jones

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

—Evelyn Waugh

time boredom being on time

History

26 Apr 2014 Added