John Updike Quotes - Page 13

In no other sport must the spectator move.

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.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.

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.

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.