top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Mortality quotes
"In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me."
"The moment one is born, the 'saw starts cutting'. People consider it as death only when the wood breaks in two pieces [during funeral]. But it was being cut from the very beginning."
"It doth not hurt", whispered a faint voice, "She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten."
"But what really happens after you are dead - that is what I want to know?I cannot tell you Renisenb. You should ask a priest these questions.He would just give me the usual answers. I want to know.We shall none of us know until we are dead ourselves."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."
"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."
"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"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."
bottom of page