Quotes from John Updike

It was not that her brain was less efficient than theirs, within its limits it was more so; but it was like the keyboard of an adding machine as opposed to that of typewriters.

Soportó la maternidad, el club-jardín y los cócteles. Compartió el café de la mañana con la mujer de la limpieza y el coñac de medianoche con su marido, confundiendo la lujuria de borracho con la reconciliación. El mundo crecía a su alrededor: hijo tras hijo surgieron de entre sus piernas [...] Ella alimentaba al mundo pero no era alimentada por él

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.

When he strays from straddling the mane of weeds, brambles rake his painted sides.

Love has its own ethics, which the deliberating will irrevocably offends.

Cudowny miód pÄ™czniaÅ' w moich pachwinach.

What kind of second-rate grief is it that permits them to walk?

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.

Alexandra's fat bare toes, corned and bent by years in shoes shaped by men's desires and cruel notions of beauty

He decides to walk around the block, to clear his head and pick his path. Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded.

June The sun is rich And gladly pays In golden hours, Silver days, And long green weeks That never end. School's out. The time Is ours to spend. There's Little League, Hopscotch, the creek, And, after supper, Hide-and-seek. The live-long light Is like a dream, and freckles come Like flies to cream.

At the sight of her submissively moving her lips his blood shouted Lord and his death leaned above him like a perfectly clear plate of glass.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Don't read your reviews, A*M*E*R*I*C*A: you are the only land.

Janet was a woman in whom early beauty had bred high expectations. Their disappointment brought with it a soured idealism, an idealism capable only of finding the world faulty.

With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, Hi.

American dream: when he first heard the phrase as a kid he pictured God lying sleeping, the quilt-colored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud.

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.

But, far from feeling Stavros as one of the enemy camp, he counts on him to keep this madwoman, his wife, under control. Through her body, they have become brothers.

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. Jill's family had a servant, and it takes her some nights to understand that dirtied dishes do not clear and clean themselves by magic, but have to be carried and washed.

She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the delicate tall clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.

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.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

Nature kills constantly, and we call her beautiful.