162 quotes
[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
[Ronnie to Nelson] "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games."
Rabbit Remembered (2000)
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?"
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
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.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
"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."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.
Bech, A Book (1970)
This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)
[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
[Mim to Nelson] "Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid."
Rabbit Remembered (2000)