John Hoyer Updike

God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.