Rabbit Redux Quotes
"Men don't even tan; filmed by sweat, they turn yellow."
"A man and his son, Earl Angstrom and Harry, are among the printers released from work."
"Harry, how about a quick one?" his father asks.
"Make it a Schlitz," Earl tells the bartender.
"But his father declines to make a ritual answer."
"Harry's mind slides away from picturing her, the way she has become."
"The old man takes number 16A around the mountain to the town of Mt. Judge, where he has lived his life."
"We don't talk about it, Harry, it isn't in her nature."
"Pop stands whittled by the great American glare, squinting in the manna of blessings."
"It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man."
"The game different now, everything the jump shot, big looping hungry blacks lifting and floating."
"The m.c.'s eyes roll out to the camera for merry and they cut to a commercial."
"The two of them, their minds gone dry as haystacks rats slither through."
"We're born and they try to feed us and change our diapers and love us and we get breasts and menstruate and go boy-crazy and finally one or two come forward to touch us and we can't wait to get married and have some babies and then stop having them and go man-crazy this time without even knowing it until you're in too deep."
"The flesh grows more serious as we age and then eventually that phase must be over and we ride around in cars in flowered hats for a while to Tucson or seeing the leaves turn in New Hampshire and visit our grandchildren."
"The way she held it sopping wet against her chest already dead, she could feel it, and screamed a great red scream as if to make a hole to let life back in."
"Floating now like a ballerina among the sparse planets of her life, Daddy, Harry, Nelson, Charlie, she thinks of her coming without him as a betrayal of her lover."
"There's enough stuff for everybody to share."
"You should be havin' your tail, is all. You're a big fella."
"Everybody knows. Niggers, coolies, derelicts, morons. Numbers writers, bus conductors, beauty shop operators, the entire brick city of Brewer."
"When Verity folds I'll fold with it and have to go on welfare. Some life. Thanks, Mom."
"The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill."
"What we most protect is where we want to be invaded."
"Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want."
"The world is what God made and it doesn't stink of money, it's never tired, too much or too little, it's always exactly full."
"Everywhere is play, even in thunder or an avalanche."
"Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things."
"We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation."
"Your mother and I tried to live by our own lights and to raise the two children God was good enough to give us by those same lights, but I know damn well it's a different world now."
"Trouble is, also it has these side effects they don't know too much about, depression in your mother's case, some nausea and lack of appetite; and nightmares, Harry, nightmares that wake her up and she wakes me up so I can hear her heart beating, beating like a tom-tom."
"Sometimes you think, Let Nature take its course, but then you wonder, What's Nature and what isn't?"
"One of the reasons, you know, I don't make it over to Mt. Judge as often as I should, Mom was pretty rough on Nelson when he was little and the kid is still scared of her."
"I don't have any problems," Rabbit tells him. "Right now I'm just holding my breath to when the kid gets back into school."
"If I'd of had the atomic bomb and these rich-kid revolutionaries to worry about, I'd no doubt just have put a shotgun to my head and let the world roll on without me."
"I'll try to get over. I ought to talk to her," Rabbit says.
"He remembers from the night we touched the moon the nudge delivered out of her dying, but doesn't want to open himself to her until he understands what is happening inside him enough to protect it."
"I know. They're putting my mother through the wringer right now."
"I'm no moralist, Harry, I know you young people nowadays have more tensions and psychological pressures than a man my age could tolerate."
"All my tri-als, Lord, soon be o-over," she sings, quitting, looking up for applause.
"Revolution, or whatever, is just a way of saying a mess is fun."
"Don't say no to life, Hussy. Let the dead bury the dead."
"I've promised before. Not that your mother and I can blame you, we know your life is difficult these days."
"You've set so much type the world is lead, right? You don't hate nobody, right?"
"Power is bullshit. Love is bullshit. Common sense is bullshit."
"It's how they get you. Let me go now. You don't like holding me, I can feel it."
"You must let Skeeter tell it if he wants to. It's good for Skeeter to tell it."
"You want to have been there because that is where it was at, right?"
"It was where you would have felt not so de-balled, right?"
"Nothing is interesting save eternal sameness."
"Hate is a paralyzing force. Hate freezes. Love strikes and liberates."
"Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains."
"We are all at work at the mighty labor of forgetting everything we know."
"The new Jesus will also bring a sword. He will be a living flame of love."
"We black men came here without names, we are the future's organic seeds, seeds have no names, right?"
"I am full of love, which is a dynamic force."
"The poor slave, on his hard pine plank, slept more soundly than the feverish voluptuary."
"Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance."
"The spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form."
"When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free."
"I was resolved to fight, and what was better still, I actually was hard at it."
"Life does want death. To be alive is to kill."
"The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake."
"Though none of his neighbors came forward to speak to him, to sparkle on the bright screen of his disaster, the neighborhood presents itself to his gaze unapologetically."
"A half-moon rests cockeyed in the blanched sky like a toy forgotten on a floor."
"The past is a fable that his life was ever centered on such details."
"Life is a cinch. Yard by yard. Life is hard."
"People want to be nice, haven't you noticed?"
"Everybody else has a life they try to fence in with some rules."
"You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout."
"Time is our element, not a mistaken invader."
"Miracles are granted but we must not lean on them."
"Everything has its cloud, a flower's bigger than a rock's, a dying person's bigger than ours."
"As in fucking, she has been rendered transparent, then filled solid with peace."
"You're young," the man absentmindedly insists.
"Who am I to put you down? The swingingest broad on Eisenhower Avenue."
"You don't have to do anything, it's just we're wasting gas this way."
"It's too late," he tells her. "You'll be a grandmother in a couple more years."