In the Beauty of the Lilies Quotes

“This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say—‘One world at a time’?”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible—think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

“All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“The reel of your real life unwound only once.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“Walking toward the light. None of us lives in the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us.”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega are His very own?”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“milk of magnesia to speed up their kids’ bowels and paregoric”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

“Life Savers and Black Jack and Chiclets and Baby Ruths and Whitman’s Sampler’s boxes of chocolates; soaps from Ivory, which was 9944/100% pure, to Lava, which scoured away grease with a stony abrasion, to the ferocious 29-Mule Team Borax; and magazines, on a rack just beside the diagonal entrance, Liberty and Collier’s and the Post and Ladies’ Home Journal”
― John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel