Poems List

To say that war is madness is like sayingthat sex is madness: true enough, from thestandpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

The New Yale Book of Quotations

5

Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporaryarrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passedthrough, and they milked you for what youwere worth, mostly when you were young andgullible.

The New Yale Book of Quotations

6

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

The New Yale Book of Quotations

5

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

The New Yale Book of Quotations

5
The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter.
4
It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.
4
She hasn’t been attending a weekly women’s discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange-juice glass.
4
Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.
3
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
4
The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach.
4

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John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. Throughout his prolific career, he published over twenty novels, ten short story collections, and several books of poetry and essays. He is particularly famous for his novel series about the character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, which includes "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981), and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990). Updike received numerous literary awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. His detailed and lyrical writing established him as one of the great stylists of American literature. He died in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009.