162 quotes
"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."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
"...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
You don't know what you don't know.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
...they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
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.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive.
Salon interview (2000)
...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend."
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "...You're in real trouble."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)