# Quote — John Updike, The Centaur

> I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

- Author: [John Updike](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike.md)
- Book: [The Centaur](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike/the-centaur.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Updike#The_Centaur_(1963)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike/the-centaur/i-miss-only

## More from this book

> 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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike/the-centaur/the-founding-fathers.md)

> I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike/the-centaur/i-must-go-to-nature.md)

> Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-updike/the-centaur/zeus-had-loved.md)