Quotes from John Updike

Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker's face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.

little is more precious in an affair for a man than being welcomed into a house he has done nothing to support, or more momentous for the woman than this welcoming, this considered largesse, her house his, his on the strength of his cock alone, his cock and company, the smell and amusement and weight of him — no buying you with mortgage payments, no blackmailing you with shared children, but welcomed simply, into the walls of yourself, an admission dignified by freedom and equality.

Live. Live, brothers, though there be naught but shame and failure to furnish forth your living.

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

The good ones develop give. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

We are most alive when we're in love.

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

Whatever men make, she says, what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.