"[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."

"This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again."

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

"But the fast lane too gets to be a rut."

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

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

"Women: you never know which side they want to dance on."

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

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

"...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same."

"[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal."

"Weeds don't know they're weeds."

"...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."

"[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.""

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

"[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "...You're in real trouble.""

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

"[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct.""

""...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind."

"[Mr Shimada, a Toyota bigwig, visiting the lot] "Young people now most interesting," he decides to say. ""Not scared of starving as through most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But scared of something – not happy. In Japan, too. Brue jeans, rock music not make happiness enough. In former times, in Japan, very simple things make men happy. Moonright on fish pond at certain moment. Cricket singing in bamboo grove. Very small things bring very great feering. Japan a rittle ireand country, must make do with very near nothing. Not rike endless China, not rike U.S. No oiru wells, no great spaces. We have only our people, their disciprine. Riving now five years in Carifornia, it disappoints me, the rack of disciprine in people of America. [...] In war, people need disciprine. Not just in war. Peace a kind of war also. We fight now not Americans and British but Nissan, Honda, Ford. Toyota agency must be a prace of disciprine, a prace of order."

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

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

"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."

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

"[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like 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.""

"Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are."

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

"[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?"

"Life is noise."

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

"[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals."

"...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."

"Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with."

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

"..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.""

"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."

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

"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.""

"Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water."

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

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

"[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish.""

"[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.""

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

"[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner."