John Updike

Like water, blood must run or grow scum.

Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.

Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.