American - Novelist | March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
John Updike
SupportSocietyEncouragementYou
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
RocksNewSoilHeartsDearPleasing
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
LoveAloneGovernmentMeLeast
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.
MarriageEndHeavenNothingReal
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
ExperienceFeelExistenceHorrible
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
TruthWomanManManifestPrivacy
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
WorldGloryActSeekShareAffair
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
ChildrenMoneyMenEatingBecome
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.
EducationWisdomChildrenParents
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
BlindPresidentUngratefulActSir
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
GovernmentMadnessOrganizedPeculiar
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
AmericaTaxTurnedHavenReagan
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict John Updike quotes