“Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. — John Updike Copy Share Image
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike Copy Share
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl… — John Updike Copy Share
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our… — John Updike Copy Share
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike Copy Share
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug… — John Updike Copy Share
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications… — John Updike Copy Share
“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he… — John Updike Copy Share
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike Copy Share
“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the… — John Updike Copy Share
