John Updike on Mind

"She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world..."

"She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

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

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

"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?"

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

"Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish."

"...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind."

"Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows."

"The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..."