top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Compromise quotes
"Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise."
"But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward."
"Sometimes a little compromise isn't a bad thing. You don't need to be precious about it."
"Otherwise, to be a movie star, it's a lot of compromise and also a lot of headaches. You can't do what you want. You become a prisoner of your fame. This happened to me in France and I don't want it."
"You have to compromise all the way. The only thing that counts is the result."
"True, Heaven prohibits certain pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise."
"They say it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise like moderately rich and just moody?"
"I sincerely believe that there's room for cutting down trees for forestry and grazing, so as we all get to eat. Everyone has to compromise."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"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."
"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."
"In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity."
"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."
"The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."
"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy."
"I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest."
bottom of page