John Updike Quotes

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.

I think there's always a bit of pain in everything that's ecstatic - relationships and love, they always come with pain.

I had to quit ballet because it felt like a part of me was dying inside.

Love always, in one way or another, means pain as well as joy.

Since time immemorial we've explored these ideas of tragedy, the things people do for love, the great weight that occurs when love is taken away and the great length and the heroism that people will exhibit to fight for the ones that they love.

War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.

There is no hell like that of a selfish heart, and there is no misfortune so great as that of not being able to make a sacrifice. These two thoughts come to me strongly this morning. It is something to have learned these truths so that we can never again doubt them.

These precious things, let them bleed.

Her smile faded. “Do you know the worst thing about it? I forgot him. Daemon was a friend, and I forgot him. That Winsol, before I was…he gave me a silver bracelet. I don’t know what happened to it. I had a picture of him. I don’t know what happened to that either. And then he gave everything he had to help me, and when it was done, everyone walked away from him as if he didn’t matter.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.

In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.

To give up another person's love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.

After his blood, that which a man can next give out of himself is a tear.

Grief is the price of victory.

Who can depart from his pain and aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, bit a skin that I tear with my own hands... Yet I cannot tarry longer.

Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself.

Each substance of a grief has twenty shadows.

I'll never stop caring. But the thing about caring is, it's inconvenient. Sometimes you've got to give when it makes no sense to at all. Sometimes you've got to give until it hurts.

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: do be my enemy for friendship's sake.

I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

You lose somebody you've possibly known for years and on top of that you lose a character that you love seeing on TV so I think that kind of makes it cool that we pay a price too. That it is painful on many levels and its amazing to be writing that moment and crossing that line right on the page and seeing the ugliness of it and having to deal with it. It's a very weird thing.

It's okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.