Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

— John Updike

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Goofball and the click of checkers calls to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

— John Updike

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholic Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

— John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

— John Updike

Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

— John Updike

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

— John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

— John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

— John Updike

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

— John Updike

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

— John Updike