Angstrom Quotes & Sayings

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. — John Updike

I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. — John Updike

There can be no such things as an Irish nationalist accepting the loyalist veto and partition. You cannot claim to be an Irish nationalist if you consent to an internal six county settlement and if you are willing to negotiate the state of Irish society with a foreign government. — Gerry Adams

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand. — John Updike

He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. — John Updike

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. — John Updike

You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you'll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that's a sad thing. — Tarryn Fisher

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom. — John Updike

Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe! — Thomas B. Macaulay

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being. — Karl Marx

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her. — John Updike

He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. — John Updike

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't. — Peter Hedges

Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. — John Updike

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

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it. — John Updike

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death. — John Updike

I'm a bit of a vagabond - a person who loses time and space because you don't know where you are. — Annie E. Clark

It's funny, really: the older you get, the more you know about the world. The synapses in your brain fire at a higher level and quicker function, your knowledge expands. But you lose part of yourself, that part able to imagine great armies that wait for nothing more than your command; the dragon that hides under your bed that only you can see, its long emerald tail flashing in the darkness; the ghost that lives in your attic that only moans at 3:23 in the morning. When you lose that innocence, the world's hues become dark and muted, and you know that dragons aren't real. There is no army. There is no ghost in the attic. But when you're nine? When you're nine, it's all probable, it's all realistic, and even more so, it's all true. — T.J. Klune

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads. — John Updike

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. — Bill Bryson

The line between courageous faith and foolish idealism is, almost by definition, one angstrom wide. — Eric Metaxas

The thing is, God has already seen every twist and turn of your life. He already knows what's in your heart. He already knows the decisions you've made. He's just waiting for you to call on Him and be honest with Him like Jonah was. — Victoria Osteen

When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed ... — John Updike

Other networks seek to interfere with the natural process of chaos. Enlightenment is chaos, complete beyond conception — Frederick Lenz

A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts. — Pauline Kael

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other. — John Updike

Are you ready?"
I nodded and whispered, "Yes."
"And nothing changes us."
"Nothing changes that we love each other. — Raine Miller

We are cruel enough without meaning to be. — John Updike

The fucking world is running out of gas. — John Updike

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort. — Arthur Golden

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting. — John Updike

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood. — John Updike

No, prudent people didn't leave their feelings hanging out; didn't leave themselves vulnerable. — J.D. Robb

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them. — Orson F. Whitney

... he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [ ... ] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? — John Updike

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family? — Paul Russell

One peek inside his top drawer had been enough for Sophie. Swimming goggles, nail clippers, a Ferragamo tie wound into a tight coil, and packets of Gulden's Spicy Brown Mustard. None of that compared to Ira Blumenstein's gold tooth, Kenneth Yang's Darth Vader lollipop, or Rich Angstrom's Magic 8 Ball. — Laura Hemphill

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. — John Updike