"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."

"[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.""

"[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.""

"[Mim to Nelson] "Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.""

"[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39] "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...""

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way.""

"[Annabelle] "...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much.""

"[Re Annabelle] ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is."

"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."

"These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is."

"His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain."

"[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.""

"[Ronnie to Nelson] "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.""

"Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth."

"Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon."

"[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."

"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."

"Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?"

"[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."

"The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way."

"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."

"He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?"

"Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?""

"[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."