162 quotes
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
The Centaur (1963)
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
"Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Weeds don't know they're weeds.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
The Centaur (1963)
His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
The Centaur (1963)
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.
Rabbit, Run (1960)
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
...golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
Essay The Bliss of Golf (1982)
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.
Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)