Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his other's grave, but no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.