She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveli… - John Updike

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She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

John Updike

English

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About John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (18 March 1932 – 27 January 2009) was an American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.

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Alternative Names: John Hoyer Updike

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Margaret Atwood John Steinbeck Martin Amis J. M. Coetzee E. M. Forster

Additional quotes by John Updike

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone po… - John Updike

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