The Witches of Eastwick Quotes

“Alexandra’s fat bare toes, corned and bent by years in shoes shaped by men’s desires and cruel notions of beauty,”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the delicate tall clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“What is of interest is what our minds retain, what our lives have given to the air. The witches are gone, vanished; we were just an interval in their lives, and they in ours. But as Sukie’s blue-green ghost continues to haunt the sun-struck pavement, and Jane’s black shape to flit past the moon, so the rumors of the days when they were solid among us, gorgeous and doing evil, have flavored the name of the town in the mouths of others, and for those of us who live here have left something oblong and invisible and exciting we do not understand. We meet it turning the corner where Hemlock meets Oak; it is there when we walk the beach in offseason and the Atlantic in its blackness mirrors the dense packed gray of the clouds: a scandal, life like smoke twisted into legend.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“She looked at her own image and removed the bandana, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today but with a sticky twistiness still in it.

As her voice had come out of her startled mouth younger than she was, she looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. It was slightly tipped; she looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show.

In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, a hag with cracked lips and a dented nose with broken veins in her septum, and when, driving in the Subaru, she stole a peek of herself in the rearview mirror, she looked worse yet, corpselike in color, the eyes wild and a single stray lash laid like a beetle-leg across one lower lid. As a tiny girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to peek back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a sense true.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“It was not that her brain was less efficient than theirs, within its limits it was more so; but it was like the keyboard of an adding machine as opposed to that of typewriters.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick