Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. John Updike More Quotes by John Updike More Quotes From John Updike Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. John Updike sunshinesimplehome Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried. John Updike treasureopportunitybeautiful American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. John Updike work-ethicselfart All blessings are mixed blessings. John Updike blessing How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes? John Updike so-boredplanetsbored You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. John Updike wisdomfatherideas Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. John Updike citiesseapeople Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. John Updike obligationfamilyway To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. John Updike ungratefulpresidentamerica I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party. John Updike partymentwo God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb. John Updike lambswellsgod 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 fogmorningcharacter Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. John Updike smelllawcountry You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind. John Updike sideswindlying Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation. John Updike atrocitiesslavecreation How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation. John Updike strangehurtair In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. John Updike selfishpartyboys At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins. John Updike safety-pinspiratenight Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. John Updike blackagesex There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. John Updike middlegoes-onmen
