# Rabbit Remembered - Author: [John Hoyer Updike](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike.md) - Quotes: 13 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered - JSON version (same data): https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered.json ## Quotes > Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/like-ronnie-said.md) Topics: [loneliness](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/loneliness.md), [family](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/family.md) > [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..." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/nelson-to-annabelle.md) Topics: [suffering](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/suffering.md), [compassion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/compassion.md) > 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? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/who-would-have.md) Topics: [the internet](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-internet.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/all-this-probing.md) Topics: [loneliness](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/loneliness.md), [television](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/television.md) > [Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/nelson-re-annabelle.md) Topics: [love](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/love.md) > [Mim, to Nelson, after discussing Annabelle's stepfather being dead] "More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was. [...] Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi pollio, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice – it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/mim-to-nelson-after.md) Topics: [gambling](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/gambling.md) > Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/nelson-wonders-why.md) Topics: [guilt](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/guilt.md) > [Nelson] "...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/nelson-people-are.md) Topics: [madness](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/madness.md) > Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/family-occasions-have.md) Topics: [family](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/family.md) > If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/if-society-is-the.md) Topics: [family](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/family.md) > [Nelson, about Pru] She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small. Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organiser and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/nelson-about-pru.md) Topics: [life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/life.md), [marriage](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/marriage.md) > [Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/janice-looking-back.md) Topics: [youth](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/youth.md), [marriage](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/marriage.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-hoyer-updike/rabbit-remembered/each-set-of-woes.md) Topics: [responsibility](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/responsibility.md)