Frases de John Updike
John Updike
Data de nascimento: 18. Março 1932
Data de falecimento: 27. Janeiro 2009
Outros nomes: Con Apdayk, John Hoyer Updike
John Hoyer Updike foi um romancista, poeta, contista, crítico de arte e crítico literário estadunidense.
Formou-se na Universidade de Harvard em 1954 e passou um ano na Inglaterra, no Knox Fellowsship, na Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, em Oxford. De 1955 a 1957, trabalhou na The New Yorker, contribuindo com contos, poemas e críticas de livros.
Tornou-se famoso e reconhecido mundialmente com sua séria de romances Rabbit, iniciada em 1960, que seguem a vida do jogador de basquetebol Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, escritos num período de mais de trinta anos e pelos quais ganhou por duas vezes o Prêmio Pullitzer.
Também de sua autoria, As Bruxas de Eastwick, escrito em 1984, tornou-se um best-seller e grande sucesso no cinema, no filme homônimo estrelado por Jack Nicholson e Cher. Já o romance Pai-Nosso Computador de 1986 aborda a questão da existência de Deus em face da ciência e tecnologia.
Em sua obra constam doze livros de ficção, cinco volumes de poesia e uma peça de teatro.
Considerado um dos grandes romancistas contemporâneos norte-americanos, faleceu em 27 de janeiro de 2009, vítima de câncer do pulmão, em Beverly, no estado de Massachussets, onde residia.
Citações John Updike
„A América é uma grande conspiração para fazer você feliz.“
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy
The early stories, 1953-1975 - Página 413, John Updike - A.A. Knopf, 2003, ISBN 1400040728, 9781400040728 - 838 páginas
„Sexo é como dinheiro, apenas o demais é suficiente.“
Sex is like money, only too much is enough
Couples - Página 437, John Updike - Knopf, 1968 - 458 páginas
„O primeiro suspiro de adultério é a liberdade; depois dele, constrangimentos imitam o desenvolvimento do casamento.“
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Couples - Página 456, John Updike - Knopf, 1968 - 458 páginas
„It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.“
Fonte: My Father's Tears and Other Stories
„Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.“
Fonte: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 3
„Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.“
Fonte: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
Contexto: Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
„The city overwhelmed our expectations.“
On London, in “A Madman,” New Yorker (22 December 1962)
Contexto: The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
„It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive.“
Salon interview (2000)
Contexto: It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived — especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars — not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
„We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.“
Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Contexto: 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.
„Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun.“
— John Updike, livro Rabbit at Rest
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Contexto: Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.
„I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible.“
— John Updike, livro The Centaur
The Centaur (1963)
Contexto: I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
„The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.“
— John Updike, livro Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Redux (1969)
Contexto: His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
„Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.“
Fonte: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
Contexto: Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
