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Book: Rabbit at Rest
Quotes of Book: Rabbit at Rest
TOP TAGS :coming-of-ageindecisionpraygods-willpartnershipbiochemistryunreliable-narratorbigotry

  1. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with.
    book-quote

  2. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.
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  3. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible.
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  4. 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.
    book-quotemusicforeshadowingrabbit-angstrom

  5. 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.
    book-quoteloverabbit-angstromdisdain

  6. 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."
    book-quoteforeshadowingforebodingrabbit-angstrom

  7. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.
    book-quotegluttonyrationalizationrabbit-angstrom

  8. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    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.
    book-quotedietrabbit-angstromnuts

  9. 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.
    book-quotemiddle-agefatrabbit-angstrom

  10. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
    book-quotefamilytelevisiongolf

  11. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    You are still you. The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and Indian names
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  12. John Updike _ Rabbit at Rest

    Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.
    book-quote
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