Quote #25
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
More from John Updike
- 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.
- I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
- 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 …
- There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
- Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
- We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
- The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- 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.