"I feel old only when I look..." - Quote by John Updike

“I'm a dull person.”

“All blessings are mixed blessings.”

“When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.”

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

“What early tongue so sweet saluteth me? Young son, it argues a distemper'd head So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed: Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye, And where care lodges, sleep will never lie; But where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.”

“But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.”

“The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid”