All Quotes

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

"[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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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.""

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

"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."

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

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

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

"...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."

"[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."

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

"[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?"

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

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

"[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.""

"[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.""

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

"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."

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

"[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."

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

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

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

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

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

"...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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else."

"A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands."

"Beware in making your sporters your councellors, and delight not to keepe ordinarily in your companie comedians or balladines."

"God gives not kings the style of gods in vain, For on His Throne His sceptre do they sway; And as their subjects ought them to obey, So kings should fear and serve their God again. If then ye would enjoy a happy reign, Observe the statutes of your Heavenly King, And from His Law make all your laws to spring, Since His lieutenant here ye should remain: Reward the just; be steadfast, true, and plain; Repress the proud, maintaining aye the right; Walk always so as ever in His sight, Who guards the godly, plaguing the profane, And so ye shall in princely virtues shine, Resembling right your mighty king divine."

"If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agreeth as well with monarchy, as God and the devil. … No bishop, no King!"

"I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse."

"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."

"Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be willfully corrupted by this stinking smoke."

"It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system."