John Updike Zitate

seite 5

„Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält.“

„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.“

„Sie wissen nicht, was Sie nicht wissen.“

„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.“

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

„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?“

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

“He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?”

“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

“One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.”

“He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.”

“[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

“There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.”

“I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.”

“[Nelson] "…People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."”

“His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain.”

“A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.”

“The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

“Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.”

“…"That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."”

“[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away. ] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"”

“What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?”

“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”

“She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world…”

“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”

“The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.”

“Like water, blood must run or grow scum.”

“He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?"”

“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

“If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.”

“[Thelma] "…You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."”

“Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.”