John Updike

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

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

No matter how cheerful and blameless the day__ activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong _ you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

Growth is betrayal.

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

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don____hichever seems likelier to win an effect.

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent." Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God's name makes them feel guilty. "God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That's the way to be happy.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.