John Updike Quotes

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

It's more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.

I look at 'Love Child' and it's as if it was written by someone else - someone who knew what they were doing.

I've kissed just three people in my life, other than stuff that I've done for TV or movies. I know - I'm weird!

Sixty per cent of how you act is drawn from memories. And it's about who you are. I am a son, brother, husband, father, and caretaker. You connect with certain instances and emotions.

Pondering, which means to weigh mentally, to deliberate, to meditate, can achieve the opening of the spiritual eyes of one's understanding.

I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.

I think sex is really about the self, and really a self-reflection.

Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it's not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what's my problem?

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.

What good can the scriptures do to a man who has no sense of his own? Of what use is as mirror to a blind man?

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

I look like a hobo?" "Worse," he said. "Like a sad hobo clown." "And you like it?" "I love it." As soon as he said it, she broke into a smile. And when Eleanor smiled, something broke inside of him. Something always did.

I looked around and acknowledged that what you see around you is proof of what exists within you.

I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.

Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.