John Updike Zitate

seite 8

„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.“

“Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.”

“Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies.”

“Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”

“But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.”

“Things change," says Mr Shimada. "Is world's sad secret.”

“Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."
"Who says that's the greatest sin?”

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

“He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.”

“[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?”

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

“Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”

“Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.”

“[Annabelle] "…health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."”

“There's more to being a human being than having your own way.”

“Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.”

“…the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?”

“[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."”

“There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.”

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”

“[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend."”

“Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."”

“Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.”

“[Nelson, re watching TV] He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials…”

“You are cynical.”

“I feared his visit. I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled—Hegel and his avatars—were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there.”

“Man is an animal, but a social animal. Society for its manifold blessings asks in exchange sacrifice and compromise. Concession is the world's walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”