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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Funny about feelings, they seem to come and go in a flash yet outlast metal.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Marriage that daily doom.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Nature isn't just something that pushes up through the sidewalk cracks and keeps the farmers trapped in the sticks but is an elixir, a luxury that can be bought and fenced off and kept pure for the more fortunate, in an impure age.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
The problem is, even if there is a Heaven how can there be one we can stand forever?
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Driving is boring ... but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
In a way, gluttony is an atheltic feat, a stretching exercise.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
History. It has always vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
A wife fumbles around with you in the dark; a mistress you meet in broad daylight, right on the sofa.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Vegas must be a great town for Laundromats. Nobody lives there, everybody is just passing through, leaving a little bit of dirt.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
How disgusting we are, when you think about it--disposable meat, but hell-bent on gratification.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Something tragic in matter itself, the way it keeps watch no matter how great our misery.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
AIDS. That virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva ... and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart any more.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Children are shaped like us, torso and legs and ears and all, yet on a scale all their own -- subcompact people made for a better but also a smaller planet.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
A woman you've endured such a gnawing desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
Nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
School's just another rip-off. All it teaches you is how to rip off dopes that haven't been to school yet.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
A kind of drought has settled over the world, a bleaching such as overtakes old color prints, even the ones kept in drawers.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of your life are shorn off, suddenly ignorable.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but out mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit at Rest
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
JOHN UPDIKE, "The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986", Odd Jobs
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't--whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
JOHN UPDIKE, Picked-Up Pieces
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
JOHN UPDIKE, Buchanan Dying
- The stripped and shapely
- Maple grieves
- The ghosts of her
- Departed leaves.
JOHN UPDIKE, A Child's Calendar
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