John Updike Quotes

348 quotes in 3901 categories

• You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure...
• Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of…
• The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
• I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.
• I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like…
• In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
• Without rain, there would be no life.
• Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
• Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
• What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty,…
• "Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by…
• ...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in…
• There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing…
• The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does…
• In no other sport must the spectator move.
• Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have…
• Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of…
• The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a…
• Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows…
• All blessings are mixed blessings.

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