Quote

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

John Updike

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Ground
Ghosts
Bird
Grieving
Year
Autumn
Shapely
Fall
Birds
Grieves
Hard
Stone
Flown
Years
Ghost
Maple
Leaves
Stripped
Stones
Departed

More quotes by John Updike

Image
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
Image
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
Image
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
Image
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
Image
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
Image
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
Image
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Image
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
Image
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
Image
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Image
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
Image
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
Image
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
Image
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
Image
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
Image
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
Image
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Image
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
John Updike