John Updike - Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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... the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

John Updike
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

John Updike
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

John Updike
Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"

John Updike
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

John Updike
[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."

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
... This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.

John Updike
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.

John Updike
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

John Updike
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.

John Updike
[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

John Updike
There's more to being a human being than having your own way.

John Updike
[Nelson] "... I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."

John Updike
"... Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.

John Updike
[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."

John Updike
[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.

John Updike
... there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

John Updike
[Harry listening to car radio]... he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.

John Updike
Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.

John Updike
The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.

John Updike
One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.

John Updike
Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.

John Updike
Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

John Updike
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

John Updike
No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

John Updike
Without the cold war, what's the point of being an American?

John Updike
... a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

John Updike
She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...

John Updike
[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

John Updike