"[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."

"...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?"

"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."

"[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled.""

"[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?""

"He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it."

"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."

"[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks."

"[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.""

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

"When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist."

"She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world..."

"When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams."

"Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind."

"[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything."

"[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here."

"Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own."

"Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish."

"[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled.""

"He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better."

"Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago."

"You don't know what you don't know."

"...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so."

"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?"

"...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be."

"...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere."

"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."

"When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain."

"Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun."

"There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. [...] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. [...] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds."