But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. - John Updike

The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.

It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.