John Updike Zitate seite 2

„Vorsichtshalber haben sie das Etikett 'Kapitalismus' ersetzt durch solche, auf denen 'freie Marktwirtschaft' und 'Konsumkultur' steht, nur roch das immer noch zu sehr nach Hund-frisst-Hund, nach allzu vielen Verlierern und maßlos abrahmenden Gewinnern. Wenn man die Hunde aber isch nicht miteinander balgen lässt, dann liegen sie den ganzen Tag im Zwinger und pennen. Im Grund besteht das Problem darin, dass die Gesellschaft anständig zu sein versucht, und mit Anstand ist gegen die menschliche Natur nichts auszurichten. Nicht das Geringste. Wir sollten alle wieder Jäger und Sammler werden, dann hätten wir eine hundertprozentige Beschäftigungsquote und ein gesundes Magenknurren.“

Terrorist

„Sie wissen nicht, was Sie nicht wissen.“

Terrorist

„Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ständig wieder gebrauchte, und mir fällt ein - eine der vergänglichen Offenbarungen der Schlaflosigkeit - dass wir, ehe wir etwas lieben, uns so etwas wie eine Nachbildung davon machen müssen, ein Erinnerungsgebilde aus flüchtigen Eindrücken und Augenblicken, das alsdann seine äussere, ziemlich langweilige Erscheinung durch eine sternbildhafte Verinnerlichung ersetzt, phosporeszierend, bequem und tragbar und am Ende unempfindlich gegen den rüden Raubbau der Wirklichkeit.“

„Wir wissen eben nicht, was einer tun sollte, wir haben nicht mehr wir früher Antworten parat; wir wursteln uns bloß weiter durch und versuchen, nicht nachzudenken.“

„Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.'
In einer Hinsicht. Aber der größte Teil der Menschheit ist so. Weil es sonst zu schwer zu ertragen ist, Mensch zu sein. Im Gegensatz zu den Tieren wissen wir zu viel. Sie, die anderen Tiere, wissen gerade genug, um ihren Job zu machen und zu sterben. Um zu essen, zu schlafen, zu vögeln, Babys zu kriegen und zu sterben.“

Terrorist

John Updike Zitate und Sprüche

„Regierung ist entweder organisiertes Wohlwollen oder organisierter Wahnsinn; seine besondere Größe erlaubt keine Schattierung.“

Terrorist

„Wir sind grausam genug, ohne es zu wollen.“

„Amerika ist eine große Verschwörung, die dich glücklich macht.“

„Ich möchte Bücher schreiben, die den Stau in jedermanns Kopf aufschließen.“

„Die Dinge ändern sich, sagt Shimada; ist das traurige Geheimnis der Welt.“

„Berühmtheit ist eine Maske, die sich in dein Gesicht frisst.“

„Du tust Dinge und tust Dinge und niemand hat wirklich eine Ahnung.“

„Jeder, der Ihnen sagt, wie Sie sich verhalten sollen, hat Whiskey im Atem.“

„… Die Japaner interessieren ihn professionell. Wie machen sie und die Deutschen das, während die Amerikaner die Röhren runtergehen?“

Diese Übersetzung wartet auf eine Überprüfung. Ist es korrekt?

„Wir überleben schließlich jeden Moment, mit Ausnahme des letzten.“

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

John Updike: Zitate auf Englisch

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Quelle: Rabbit, Run

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Is Rich

Quelle: Rabbit Is Rich

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”

“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Quelle: Rabbit, Run

“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

Quelle: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6; Gratia Dei sum quod sum translates to ”Thanks be to God that I am what I am”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Redux

Quelle: Rabbit Redux

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal, New York Times (26 August 1981)

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”

Quelle: A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”

"They Thought They Were Better" in TIME magazine (21 July 1980) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924295,00.html

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”

John Updike buch Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Quelle: Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Quelle: Rabbit, Run

“It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Quelle: Rabbit, Run

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

John Updike buch Couples

Quelle: Couples (1968), Ch. 2

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Is Rich

Quelle: Rabbit Is Rich

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

Quelle: Self-Consciousness

“If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

John Updike buch The Centaur

Quelle: The Centaur (1963), Ch. 4

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”

Quelle: A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“… hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Quelle: Rabbit, Run

“We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything”

“[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Redux

Quelle: Rabbit Redux

“He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”

John Updike buch Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.”

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

“[Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it.”

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)