Collected Meditations
Showing 25 quotesNow that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.— John Updike
topics:
Wisdom
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.— John Updike
topics:
Wisdom
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.— John Updike
topics:
Wisdom
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.— John Updike
topics:
Sympathy
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.— John Updike
topics:
Sports
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.— John Updike
topics:
Religion
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.— John Updike
topics:
Poetry
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.— John Updike
topics:
Patience
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.— John Updike
topics:
Morning
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.— John Updike
topics:
Marriage
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.— John Updike
topics:
Marriage
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.— John Updike
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.— John Updike
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.— John Updike
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.— John Updike
topics:
Dreams