If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a young person's fear and intimidation when confronting complex literature.
John Updike shares a personal memory from his adolescence, highlighting how he felt overwhelmed by the dense and challenging prose of 'Ulysses' after having just experienced success with T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land.' This moment serves to illustrate the contrast between the comforting and accessible nature of some literary works compared to others that evoke fear and a sense of cosmic dread, indicating the varying effects that literature can have on readers depending on their maturity and readiness to tackle difficult themes.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a literary discussion about the challenges of reading classic works, one might say, 'Like Updike, I often find myself intimidated by dense texts.'
More from John Updike
All quotes →Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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.
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.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
Similar quotes
The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.
Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.
I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.