You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.
John UpdikeThink binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.
John UpdikeEach 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?
John UpdikeIn general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John UpdikeTo be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike