Quotes from Adam Begley

We forget most of our past but embody all of it.

The excitement and glamour of living in New York had always, for Updike, come bundled with less agreeable sensations. He felt "crowded, physically and spiritually" by the city's "ghastly plentitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness.

She had a way of wearing anything so that the cloth seemed glad and independently animated.

A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain's delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.

I reflect that all art, all beauty, is reflection.

Seven months after "Blessed Man," he wrote a sequel of sorts, also in stitched-together, "fugal" form. It's hard to read "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car," which he sent off to Maxwell in early May 1961, and not think that we're once again reading raw autobiography.

the "human need for transcendence should be met with minimal embarrassments to reason,

the students with their clear skin and shining eyes and inviting innocence, like a blank surface one wishes to scribble obscenities on.

The blatancy of the icy-hearted satire repelled me.

Linda wrote to her son from her hotel room opposite the Cambridge Common just hours after they parted, the first volley in an extraordinary correspondence that continued until the week of her death, nearly four decades later. During his freshman year, she wrote virtually every day—in other words, she appeared in his mailbox in the morning, a palpable, reassuring presence thanks to her remarkable skill as a letter writer.

Updike "describes to no purpose.

I scuttled without a shell, between houses and wives, a snake between skins, a monster of selfishness, my grotesque needs naked and pink.

What they love is love and being in love." They are in the grip of

Updike quashed the voice of his conscience, while at the same time clinging to a "me-first Salvationism.

people don't entertain you, / Nature will"—is

I read and talked into the microphone and was gracious to the local rich, the English faculty and the college president, and the students with their clear skin and shining eyes and inviting innocence, like a blank surface one wishes to scribble obscenities on.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started";