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"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy."
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"Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure."

"I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure."

"Not town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens ... do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?"

"A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot..."

"Let us have Wine and Women Mirth and Laughter Sermons and soda-water the day after."

"The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing."

"Laugh, enjoy and pleasure make you live more."

"... I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other..."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."

"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."

"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
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