updike Quotes

“Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”

“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”

“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”

“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

“Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“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.”

“The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”