The pleasures of reading Updike

"Germaine said, 'He loved you,' which sounded right, since families teach us how love exists in a realm above liking or disliking, coexisting with indifference, rivalry, or even antipathy." -- From "Brother Grasshopper"

"A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in in the grass by the lichen-stained field walls. Then clouds swept in again, and the landscape was dipped in shadow." -- From "The Afterlife"