S. Quotes

“You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on--the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It's rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won't quite catch fire, isn't it?”
― John Updike, S.

“Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to -- otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended -- I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead -- and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down.”
― John Updike, S.