John Updike

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.

His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

[Harry having drawn at golf] The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?

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.

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."

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.