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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 55992ab | May I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast? They are hard as a haul-seiner's conscience and dry as a dredger's tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship's keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What's more, eaten first thing in the morning .. | maryland | John Barth | |
| 53ec300 | Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my 'Inquirey', starting at walls hunting ducks and 'coons,reading, playing politics, and whatnot. I'm interested in any number of things, and enthusiastic about nothing. | John Barth | ||
| d4347a6 | beg Love's pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change. | John Barth | ||
| 6697787 | So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life. | John Barth | ||
| 8f1ca73 | The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He.. | faith god life self-consciousness | John Updike | |
| 06d1120 | He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly.. | class rabbit-angstrom resignation vacation | John Updike | |
| 9869802 | All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years' experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves. | John Updike | ||
| eff378f | Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom's son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy's chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him...Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tr.. | nelson-angstrom toddlers | John Updike | |
| 74e684b | The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy's idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city. | art thomas-eakins | John Updike | |
| 12b4992 | Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko's hovering panels or Barnett Newman's stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. ... The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are.. | art james-mcneill-whistler | John Updike | |
| f9c4761 | A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking. | John Updike | ||
| 97fe5bb | Make no mistake: if he rose at all It was as His body; If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, | John Updike | ||
| 0843a61 | An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. | John Updike | ||
| 3644ee8 | As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood. | frustration growing-up nelson-angstrom parenthood rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| 360cdfb | This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face." ("Snowing.. | couples flirting | John Updike | |
| dfea34f | Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humour of her Jew. Ken looked lika a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farming.. | John Updike | ||
| 99a0b27 | The reel of your real life unwound only once. | John Updike | ||
| bf2a059 | TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee. | family golf sitcom television | John Updike | |
| 1d9db6f | There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head. | John Updike | ||
| f176216 | We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! | John Updike | ||
| 6b54072 | He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting. | janice-springer rabbit-angstrom sin | John Updike | |
| 28579b1 | For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class. | John Updike | ||
| 283488b | 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. | christianity god money religion | John Updike | |
| 58a89cd | When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helple.. | boxers rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| 5688779 | And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market--the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage . . . --JOHN UPDIKE, "Perfection Wasted" | Carole Radziwill | ||
| 311cd35 | Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children" They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected. Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in the more securely to the worldly buzz of television, alphabet, and street talk, culture polluting their gazes' dawn blue. It makes you see at last the value of those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces like shapes .. | John Updike | ||
| c447bce | Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. | chaos devil god order skeeter | John Updike | |
| dfa5077 | Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads. | despair hospital lust rabbit-angstrom regret | John Updike | |
| 6bf25d3 | He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make. | John Updike | ||
| 2546bbe | The cloud of the consomme's warmth enveloped her face and revived her poise. In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace. | John Updike | ||
| 7175c35 | I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name" Though authors are a dreadful clan To be avoided if you can, I'd like to meet the Indian, M. Anantanarayanan. I picture him as short and tan. We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan. I'd say, with admirable elan , "Ah, Anantanarayanan -- I've heard of you. The Times once ran A notice on your novel, an Unusual tale of God and Man." And Anantanarayanan Would seat me on a lush divan And read his name -- that su.. | John Updike | ||
| f9d9b9e | Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. | lust | John Updike | |
| cf19186 | It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you." -- John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories" | Penny Reid | ||
| 13b23cb | We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. into the nether world | John Updike | ||
| d53ab4c | Which witch is which? | John Updike | ||
| da3ad28 | It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects. | Horace Walpole | ||
| 97c1463 | Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda. Manfred had contracted a marriage for his son with the Marquis of Vicenza's daughter, Isabella; and she had already been d.. | Horace Walpole | ||
| dae3047 | sqf gft: bry ykh frd rwHny, hmnqdr shj`t lzm st khh bry srhng swr w br yn gfthsh fzwd: fqT shj`t m, byd mlym bshd | Victor Hugo | ||
| d7272cd | For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians. | Victor Hugo | ||
| a967aa7 | A man may beg, but a woman has to sell. | reality | Victor Hugo | |
| c43f41a | Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes. | Victor Hugo | ||
| d0addba | However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius. When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness. | Victor Hugo | ||
| d2358fe | He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being." He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by thi.. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 601534c | This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial, -- there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation, -- are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this y.. | Victor Hugo |