top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Observation quotes
"A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation."
"The tedious never die, that's what makes them tedious."
"She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea."
"The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting."
"How do you feel?He rubbed his stomach. "Like I've been eating Styrofoam."
"In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain."
"I'm almost afraid to tell you. Let's put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country."
"His shoulder-length hair was a rich, dark-brown color with a slight wave to it and it flowed behind him as he ran into the center of the gypsies. He was tall, muscular, and so beautifully handsome, yet primal. He looked magnificent."
"Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns."
"She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace."
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."
"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."
"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."
"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."
"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
"Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward."
"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."
bottom of page