Rabbit Is Rich Quotes

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“The fucking world is running out of gas.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

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

“He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed....”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Cunt would be a good flavor of ice cream, Sealtest ought to work on it.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“each day he is a little less afraid to die.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“We carry our heredity concealed for a while and then it pushes through. Out of those narrow DNA coils.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“I think it’s a helluva world we’re coming to, where a young couple like yourselves can’t afford to buy a car or own a home. If you can’t get your foot on even the bottom rung of a society geared like this, people are going to lose faith in the system.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“his own life closed in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Some day what would give him great pleasure would be to take a large round rock and crush her skull in with it.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there’s been in the world and all the fucking there’s going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He’ll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“could never understand why people can’t drink saltwater, it can’t be any worse than mixing Coke and potato chips.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“He loves men, uncomplaining with their potbellies and cross-hatched red necks, embarrassed for what to talk about when the game is over, whatever the game is. What”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Oblong cocooned little visitor, the baby shows her profile blindly in the shuddering flashes of color jerking from the Sony, the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid aslant, lips bubbled forward beneath the whorled nose as if in delicate disdain, she knows she’s good. You can feel in the curve of the cranium she’s feminine, that shows from the first day. Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. Fortune’s hostage, heart’s desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich