Frases de John Updike

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“Estamos más vivos cuando estamos enamorados.”

“Las malas hierbas no saben que son malas hierbas.”

“Ese es el problema de preocuparse por alguien, comienza a sentirse sobreprotector. Entonces comienzas a sentirte abarrotado.”

“La cultura brasileña refleja más la africana que la americana. En los EE. UU. tenemos el jazz y casi que sólo eso. No existen personajes como Machado de Assis, un mulato considerado uno de los más grandes escritores del país.”

“Cuatro años de Harvard fueron suficientes. Todavía tengo mucho que aprender, pero se me ha dado la noción liberadora de que ahora puedo enseñarme a mí mismo.”

“El sexo es como el dinero, sólo 'demasiado' es suficiente.”

“Le da la sensación de estar rodeado de libertad, de oxígeno. Tothero es como un remolino de aire, y el edificio en el que se encuentra, las calles del pueblo, no son más que escaleras y pasadizos del espacio. Es tan perfecta y coherente la libertad en que se ha convertido el desorden del mundo gracias al simple estallido de su decisión, que todos los caminos parecen buenos, todos los movimientos serán caricias para su piel, y ni un solo átomo de su felicidad se alteraría si Tothero le dijera que en lugar de ir a una cita con dos chicas iban a reunirse con dos machos cabríos, o que no iban a Brewer sino al Tíbet".”

“Hay una cristalización que continúa en un poema que el joven puede sacar, pero que el hombre de mediana edad no puede.”

“... "Esa enfermedad que tiene hace un trabajo horrible en ti. Tus pulmones se llenan".”

“Eres cínico”

“No sabes lo que no sabes.”

“El uno mismo esencial es inocente, y cuando prueba su propia inocencia sabe que vive para siempre.”

“Su voz es apresurada, para mantenerse al día con su cerebro.”

“Ser capaz de escribir se convierte en una especie de escudo, una forma de esconderse, una forma de transformar demasiado instantáneamente el dolor en miel.”

“El olor a buen consejo siempre hace que Rabbit quiera correr hacia el otro lado.”

“Ahora que tengo sesenta años, veo por qué la idea de la sabiduría de los ancianos ha pasado de la moneda.”

“[eres una mujer en la televisión en la rueda de la fortuna] Ella te enorgullece de ser un mamífero de dos patas.”

“Los automóviles solían tener formas tan elegantes, como los aviones, cuando el combustible era barato, veinticinco centavos por galón.”

“La celebridad es una máscara que se come en la cara.”

“[en el hospital, Janice hablando con el Dr. Olman en presencia de Harry en la sala] "¿Qué le pasa exactamente a su corazón?"”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“… 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”