from Updike’s Witches of Eastwich
“This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old?” p. 6
“Not until midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion–a bent rib, as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum had it–but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters.” p. 14
August 7, 2014