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"And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?"
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"..."Oh, Marilla, looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them, exclaimed Anne. "You mayn't get the things themselves; but nothing can prevent you from having the fun of looking forward to them. Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.' But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed...."

"Sometimes I feel as if I'm only a doorman awaiting the arrival of her royal majesty."

"It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album."

"You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book."

"Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so."

"She was thinking of his mouth on hers. Which seemed only fair since he'd given a lot of thought to the same thing."'Night, she whispered."Night, he whispered back.And yet neither of them moved."

"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending."

"Oh, goodie," Puck said as I stepped forward. "I'm going to have a rash in the most uncomfortable places."

"There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually."

"It's nice to have things to look forward to."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it."

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."

"Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop, the gut expanded to take in more and more."
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