Quotes from John Updike

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

We are most alive when we're in love.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

The fucking world is running out of gas.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.