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f055aee Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little contribution leaves you with nothing. John Updike
533d95d She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There's that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men's dirt--insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish brightne.. John Updike
48ad260 Come here," he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him. "No," Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her." John Updike
f86b453 He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals. He wants to go south, down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women. It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and f.. John Updike
7c85469 Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath. John Updike
e50d93f Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, .. John Updike
5de0cc8 The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him. John Updike
5c96d5f He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? John Updike
9a182ec He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. John Updike
9416a59 It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. John Updike
2b73539 He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man. John Updike
87a9c18 I felt the superb iron of Barth's paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this realm of prose--the specifically Christian--usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishonesty. "Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his universe, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a question.... The solution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need is the absolutely new event.... There is no w.. John Updike
23dca84 I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. John Updike
d61543c America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. John Updike
423923a Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. John Updike
9c38fa3 The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. John Updike
9608c9b He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance. John Updike
2f2fd81 Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. John Updike
a73a1b0 The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there. John Updike
2111e3f Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. John Updike
89d2aa9 The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. John Updike
b25b176 By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. John Updike
d16fa00 Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules. John Updike
9d31e57 All men are boys time is trying to outsmart. John Updike
4f26677 Like water, blood must run or grow scum. John Updike
760595f Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling. John Updike
6e9c27a Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way. John Updike
9ea6810 Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. John Updike
ec853d3 Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere." John Updike
637bfb0 I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?" John Updike
a9b8284 there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so. John Updike
d491b20 You don't know what you don't know. John Updike
1dc92e4 Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. John Updike
54da348 Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled." John Updike
57aa777 Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own. John Updike
fa33394 Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here. John Updike
d1ac123 When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams. John Updike
a21eccd She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world... John Updike
d22edd2 When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist. John Updike
40fa25f Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife." John Updike
d65c01a He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it. John Updike
9ef3499 Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled." John Updike
56b4892 Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish." John Updike
622f832 You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI. John Updike
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