If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Natural beauty is fleeting and its impermanence can evoke sadness, making artificial beauty seem mockingly inadequate.
This quote by John Updike reflects on the transient nature of natural beauty, suggesting that its temporary existence brings a sense of melancholy. It contrasts this with artificial flowers, which, although not genuine, highlight the irony and sadness of trying to replicate beauty that is meant to be ephemeral.
Themes
Natural BeautyTemporaryArtificialSadnessIrony
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the importance of preserving nature, one might reference this quote to discuss the value of real beauty.
More from John Updike
All quotes βDost 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.
John UpdikeRead
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.
John UpdikeRead
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.
John UpdikeRead
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.
John UpdikeRead
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
John UpdikeRead
Similar quotes
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Teju ColeRead
To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be, as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process.
David MilchRead
To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.
Martha GrahamRead
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Movies are dreams! And they work on you subliminally.
Carrie FisherRead
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead