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"The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."
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"People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it."

"It's strange to see people you don't know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks."

"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."

"The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough."

"Most people spend less time outside than prisoners."

"The Republic's most wanted criminal is just a boy, sitting before me, suddenly vulnerable, laying all his weaknesses out for me to see."

"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."

"Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder."

"His eyes said what I cannot see."

"New Englanders could be so brusque."
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."

"As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood."
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