Quotes from John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
- John Updike
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
- John Updike
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
- John Updike
You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
- John Updike
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
- John Updike
I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.
- John Updike
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
- John Updike
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
- John Updike
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.
- John Updike
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
- John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
- John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
- John Updike