Rabbit at Rest

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.

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.

[Harry listening to car radio] ...he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.

One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.

[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.

...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.

Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.

[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.

Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.

She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...

"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."

Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

[Pru] "...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."

Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.

You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.

There's more to being a human being than having your own way.

[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?

...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.

[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.

...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.

"Things change," says Mr Shimada. "Is world's sad secret."

He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

You don't know what you don't know.

...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

"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."

When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

"...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be."

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

"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."