Quote

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

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
Lovers
Doth
Produce
Polish
Fashion
Hoping
Face
Produces
Faces
Lover
Love
Beloved
Mirror
Skull
Mirrors
Skulls

More quotes by John Updike

Image
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Image
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
John Updike
Image
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
Image
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
John Updike
Image
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John Updike
Image
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Image
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
Image
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
Image
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
Image
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike