John Updike Quotes

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

I thought that we all were afraid of death, but I've talked to my wife and other people, and they're not afraid of death the way I am. I find that really confusing. I don't like the idea of nothingness - that's terrifying to me.

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

The thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.