top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Childhood quotes
"For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?"
"When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels."
"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."
"Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"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."
"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."
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."
"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."
"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."
"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."
bottom of page