John Hoyer Updike

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.

He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.

[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..."

Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.

[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love."

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.