Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong. John Updike
Some Similar Quotes
  1. This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/ Whatever interests the rest interests me - Walt Whitman

  2. My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where... - Walter Kirn

  3. In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies. - Brandon Stanton

  4. When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed. - Adelle Waldman

  5. Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does - Groucho Marx

More Quotes By John Updike
  1. It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

  2. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

  3. If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

  4. The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

  5. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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