John Updike is dead. I was never a big fan, but the man sure could write nice sentences. For some reason this complete throwaway paragraph in Rabbit, Run stayed with me:

This building, which once commanded half of the acreage the town is now built on, still retains, behind a shattered and vandalized fence, its yard, a junkheap of brown stalks and eroded timber that will in the summer bloom with an unwanted wealth of weeds, waxy green wands and milky pods of silk seeds and airy yellow heads almost liquid with pollen.

The paragraph has little function or purpose in the book except to serve as a sort of symbol for Rabbit himself and it sets a mood of lost potential, etc. But it just sort of sits there, looking pretty. In the context of the book, it's a bad paragraph. But there's something about the almost-too-muchness of poetic alliteration in it that stuck with me.