John Updike Quotes

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

I've become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because... I've been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

In my limited realm of experience, beginnings led to endings.

Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.

What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

We come. We go. And in between we try to understand.

No matter what heights you achieve, even if you're Brad Pitt, the slide is coming, sure as death and taxes.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Treat Death as it treats us: with utter indifference.

Learn how to live and you'll know how to die; learn how to die, and you'll know how to live.

Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.

We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

Bands are like people. They're born and then they die.

As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.