John Updike Zitate seite 4

„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.“

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

John Updike: Zitate auf Englisch

“When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.”

Salon interview (2000)

“No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.”

Quelle: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

“Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.”

John Updike buch Couples

Quelle: Couples (1968), Ch. 2

“All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.”

John Updike buch Couples

Quelle: Couples (1968), Ch. 5

“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.”

Writers on Themselves (1986)

“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“…golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”

Quelle: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”

Essay The Bliss of Golf (1982), reprinted in Golf Dreams (1996)

“I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.”

John Updike buch Couples

Quelle: Couples (1968), Ch. 1

“Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.”

John Updike buch The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

“[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "…You're in real trouble."
"I know… But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."
"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in what?"”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

"In us. In life," she says.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?”

John Updike buch Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“…If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The great thing about the dead, they make space.”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.”

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”

Interview in London Observer (30 August 1987)

“God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”

On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)

“[Nelson, to Harry] "…I keep feeling hassled."
"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?”

John Updike buch Rabbit at Rest

"I suppose."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.”

John Updike buch Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)