{"author":"John Updike","author_id":"John+Updike","total_quotes":115,"quotes":[{"text":"Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.","author":"John Updike","tags":["1960","childhood","futility","lost-innocence","lost-youth","rabbit-angstrom","sense-memory"],"id":1564,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.","author":"John Updike","tags":["stupid","know","you "],"id":1996,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't  whichever seems likelier to win an effect.","author":"John Updike","tags":["humour","humorists"],"id":10000,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.","author":"John Updike","tags":["marriage","peasant","every "],"id":10311,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"Sex is like money  only too much is enough.","author":"John Updike","tags":["witty"],"id":16698,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either.","author":"John Updike","tags":["atheism","damnation","death","eternal-damnation","god","hell","poor","religion"],"id":18901,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.","author":"John Updike","tags":["despair","lust"],"id":19746,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.","author":"John Updike","tags":["criticism","literature","study "],"id":21888,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.","author":"John Updike","tags":["9-11","greatness","horror","smallness","witness"],"id":23327,"author_id":"John+Updike"},{"text":"[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.","author":"John Updike","tags":["constitution","free-speech","politics","united-states","united-states-constitution","war"],"id":27077,"author_id":"John+Updike"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":115,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}