Quote #22

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.

More from John Updike

  1. The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
  2. He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social …
  3. A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choi…
  4. But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
  5. Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obsce…
  6. He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
  7. Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
  8. I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

All John Updike quotes