John Updike Quotes

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

If we have as a clear certainty with which to plan, total uncertainty, then that would be helpful.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

There are gray areas in everything.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

the truth is often a mixed message

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.