John Updike - Rabbit at Rest (1990)

76 Sourced Quotes

View all John Updike Quotes
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

John Updike
[Nelson] "... One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

John Updike
[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

John Updike
..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

John Updike
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

John Updike
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

John Updike
His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

John Updike
[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

John Updike
Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.

John Updike
[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

John Updike
[Thelma] "... We're too old to keep being foolish."

John Updike
[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

John Updike
[Pru] "... He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."

John Updike
[Thelma] "... You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

John Updike
[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "... You're in real trouble."

John Updike
In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.

John Updike
Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

John Updike
When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

John Updike
... If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.

John Updike
"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?"

John Updike
[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

John Updike
This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.

John Updike
Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

John Updike
Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?

John Updike
... he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

John Updike
... he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.

John Updike
[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.

John Updike