Rabbit Angstrom Quotes

“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

“Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“I don’t think about politics,” Rabbit says. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don’t see why we’re supposed to walk down the street with our hands tied behind our back and let ourselves be blackjacked by every thug who says he has a revolution going. And it really burns me up to listen to hotshot crap-car salesmen dripping with Vitalis sitting on their plumped-up asses bitching about a country that’s been stuffing goodies into their mouth ever since they were born.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“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

“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

“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

“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

“He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

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

“In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Le da la sensación de estar rodeado de libertad, de oxígeno. Tothero es como un remolino de aire, y el edificio en el que se encuentra, las calles del pueblo, no son más que escaleras y pasadizos del espacio. Es tan perfecta y coherente la libertad en que se ha convertido el desorden del mundo gracias al simple estallido de su decisión, que todos los caminos parecen buenos, todos los movimientos serán caricias para su piel, y ni un solo átomo de su felicidad se alteraría si Tothero le dijera que en lugar de ir a una cita con dos chicas iban a reunirse con dos machos cabríos, o que no iban a Brewer sino al Tíbet".”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know.”
― John Updike

“I can handle it. I'm no addict, I'm a recreational killer."

"Yeah" Harry says, "like Hitler was a recreational killer.”
― John Updike

“But now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless anymore, everybody wants their fun.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“A mood of stirred-up unsatisfied desire at whose fringes licks the depressing idea that nothing matters very much, we'll all soon be dead.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach whose cause he can't locate until he realizes it is the terror of being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“About being mortal- I suppose it affects different people in different ways, but for me there's never been a thinning out. Being alive, no matter how sick I feel, feels absolute. You're absolutely alive and when you're not you'll be absolutely something else.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“..and of AIDS. The virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva or cunt slime, and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart anymore.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest