“It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. ”

“It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. ”

“A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast. Piet was moved, beholding his daughter launched intoanother dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thornes had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Piet saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever.” John Updike, Couples, 1968.”

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

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

“I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.”

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.”

“Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.”