A Quote by John Updike

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

John Updike

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Bookstores Forts Light Lonely Neighborhoods Onto Sidewalk Spilling

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John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.

Roy Blount, Jr.

As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

Janet Echelman

Music might tame and civilize wild beasts, but 'tis evident it never yet could tame and civilize musicians.

John Gay

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

Christina Baker Kline

The treasures of Cathay were never found. In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

Louis Simpson

On the lawn next to the sidewalk a fire ant colony is swarming. The ants are pouring out of a mound nest, here no more than an irregular pile of dirt partly flattened by the last pass of a lawnmower. Winged queens and males are taking off on their nuptial flight, protected by angry-looking workers that run up and down the grass blades and out onto the blistering-hot concrete of the sidewalk. The species is unmistakably Solenopsis geminata, the native fire ant.

E. O. Wilson

I don’t smoke, although it looks fantastic in films. But I light matches on those thinking blank nights when I crawl my route out onto the roof of the garage and the sky while my parents sleep innocent and the lonely cars move sparse on the faraway streets, when the pillow won’t stay cool and the blankets bother my body no matter how I move or lie still. I just sit with my legs dangling and light matches and watch them flicker away.

Daniel Handler

If you live in poor neighborhoods - I know from living in several poor neighborhoods - the worst supermarkets in the city are in the poorest neighborhoods, where people don't have cars.

Sandra Cisneros

I stand upon a block of stillness. It is more secure than any sidewalk. I bring with me my own sidewalk.

Jane Roberts

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

Margaret Atwood

New Yorkers want to be compassionate, and they want to live in a city where homeless people aren't stuffed into shelters, spilling out onto the streets. They also want a support system that works.

Letitia James

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

Michael Ondaatje

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

Edith Wharton

All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.

Betty Smith

Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.

Stephen King

Joy is overwhelming fun - fun so big that it overflows your mind, heart, body - as if all of life and love were spilling into you and you were spilling out.

Bernie De Koven

A Quote by John Updike

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