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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ff93ee4 | The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' -- by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. | love read sex speak write | John Barth | |
| 84d0d3e | When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of pool-water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price." | John Updike | ||
| 1f0c1db | The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms. Now, | John Updike | ||
| 510c3aa | The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to .. | John Updike | ||
| e7116ef | Zhizn' -- ad, no etot ad prekrasen. | John Updike | ||
| 6dd0a69 | A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mothe.. | John Updike | ||
| edfe241 | Sex is like money; only too much is enough." John Updike" | Young | ||
| c10962b | The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is .. | John Updike | ||
| 377651d | He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons. | p-g-wodehouse parsons reading science-fiction | John Updike | |
| 45cdade | Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good." | John Updike | ||
| aaaeed0 | Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside. Sunshine, | John Updike | ||
| d83190a | She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry's eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its flo.. | John Updike | ||
| fbd573c | 'Tis not the eating, nor 'tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess. | Alcoholism | ||
| 8a250d3 | Drink is in itself a good creature of God, but the abuse of drink is from Satan. | Alcoholism | ||
| 2f00153 | Alcoholism is the disease of more. | Alcoholism | ||
| 89c44e8 | Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and se.. | John Updike | ||
| 5a23294 | The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor. | boston-red-sox marriage ted-williams | John Updike | |
| e341d8a | The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny that Ruth won't notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen. | John Updike | ||
| ee54077 | Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man's perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work "women's fiction." While these books may be tagged as "women's fiction" on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. These books are allowed to be more than what they.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 3f83717 | Sweetie, the bluebird has flown. We're too young to sit around the rest of our lives waiting for it to fly back in the window. It won't. It can't fly backwards.' He was using his hands again in that disagreeable stagey way, and Ruth was angered by the flicker of conceit in his expression when he struck upon the image of the bluebird fying backwards - a piece of animation on the screen of his face. | John Updike | ||
| 1752ce0 | The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinions and even into those of our grandfathers. | John Updike | ||
| e13eff6 | Says John Updike, 'Serifs exist for a purpose. They help the eye pick up the shape of the letter. Piquant in little amounts, sanserif in page-size sheets repels readership as wax paper repels water; it has a sleazy, cloudy look. | David Ogilvy | ||
| 3e1802a | The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet | John Updike | ||
| 6fee120 | Perhaps that's why, of the Four, Google seems the most retiring, the most likely to remove itself from the limelight. "Gods don't take curtain calls," John Updike famously wrote of Ted Williams's refusal to come out of the dugout to acknowledge the crowd after his last at bat. Lately, Google seems to prefer to keep its cap low over its eyes," | Scott Galloway | ||
| 0cdaca0 | Chovek rano ostariava, no um k'sno mu idva. | John Updike | ||
| bcb6051 | Poslednoto, koeto chovek mozhe da napravi, e da otide na razstrel pone na sobstvenite si dva kraka. | John Updike | ||
| c515ab7 | One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with. | John Updike | ||
| 99fbe18 | Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania, simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who haven't even a fraction of Updike's talent and yet must hoe the same arid patch for stories. No | Teju Cole | ||
| a311f18 | If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead. | John Updike | ||
| e716f1f | Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do but go down it. | John Updike | ||
| bdad93c | He doesn't know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn't know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness. | John Updike | ||
| 1104f28 | to pay | John Updike | ||
| 5a83d08 | Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a de.. | John Updike | ||
| 16e85ae | He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of mute vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. | John Updike | ||
| b695fdc | God, he's in sad shape." "Who isn't?" Ruth asks. "You don't seem to be." "I eat, is what you mean." "No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You're not fat. You're right in proportion." She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, "Rabbit, you're a Christian gentleman." Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth." | John Updike | ||
| 48513c4 | What's this about you being married?" "Well, I was. Still am." He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It's like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this--these trees, this pavement--was life, the real and only thing." | John Updike | ||
| 037bc95 | As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall. The body lacks voice to sing its own song. | John Updike | ||
| 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 |