To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John UpdikeI'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.
John UpdikeMy father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John UpdikeRain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John UpdikeIn asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
John Updike