Quote

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

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
Thing
Losses
Static
Sacrifices
Mixed
Betrayal
Sacrifice
Loss
Betrayals
Happiness
Compounded

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Image
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
Image
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
Image
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
Image
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
Image
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Image
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
Image
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
Image
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Image
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
Image
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
Image
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
Image
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike