If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love is essential to our existence, shaping our very being and providing meaning beyond mere survival.
In this quote, John Updike expresses the profound impact of love on human existence, suggesting that love is what truly defines us. Without love, he argues, we are reduced to mere animals, experiencing only the cycle of life and fear. Love elevates us from the mundane and gives purpose to our lives, making it an intrinsic part of our humanity.
Themes
LoveExistenceHumanityPurposeFear
In practice
Example use cases
In a wedding speech, one might say, 'As John Updike eloquently stated, we are fated to love one another, and it's this love that brings us together today.'
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.
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
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Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
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Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.
Mary OliverRead
Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!
Pablo NerudaRead
A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.
Milan KunderaRead