If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the struggle against minimizing extraordinary experiences to fit our limited understanding.
John Updike emphasizes the human tendency to confront monumental events with the fear of trivializing them. The quote suggests that in the face of greatness or horror, we strive to resist the urge to simplify or diminish our experience, recognizing the vastness of what we witness and the importance of embracing it fully rather than filtering it through our small perspectives.
Themes
GreatnessHorrorPerceptionFightSmallness
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about how we process trauma and significant events in our lives.
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
This thing comes to me, not by the hearing of the ear, but by my own personal experience: I know of a surety that Jesus manifests Himself unto His people as He doth not unto the world.
Charles SpurgeonRead
Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he 'lives' his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.
G. I. GurdjieffRead
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
Henry David ThoreauRead
It feels like we're always juggling many pieces of information at once or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.
Bo BurnhamRead
Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others. Sometimes it does. But the danger is, that while a man grows better pleased with himself, he may be growing less pleasing to others. Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has presented.
James BoswellRead
He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.
Jonathan EdwardsRead