“[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.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

— John Updike , book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic…" by John Updike?

John Updike 240

American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, p. 12
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“Up to this point White has been following well-known analysis, but now he makes a fatal error - he begins to use his own head.”

Siegbert Tarrasch (1862–1934) German chess player, chess writer, and chess theoretician

Concerning a World Chess Championship match, as quoted by William Ewart Napier in "The Bright Side of Chess" (1952) by Irving Chernev, p. 114

“McDonald's is a place to rock / It is a restaurant where they buy food to eat / It is a good place to listen to the music / People flock here to get down to the rock music.”

Wesley Willis (1963–2003) American singer-songwriter

Rock 'N Roll McDonald's
Lyrics, Solo

“Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama? That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there … it's not necessary to answer the question, "Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?"”

Aaron Sorkin (1961) American screenwriter, producer, playwright

before you decide to listen to it and like it or not.
Interview for Comedy Central.

“If you listen to a song on the radio you can definitely tell whose music it is. When you listen to my music you can tell it is Basshunter.”

Basshunter (1984) Swedish singer, record producer and DJ

BBC interview (25 July 2008) http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/entertainment/newsid_7522000/7522129.stm

“You know the man who told me about it on the bus,
as it went up the hill out of Scranton, Pennsylvania,
he shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head,
and he said (and this is exactly what he said)
"Boy that sure must've been something.
Just imagine thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of mashed bananas.
Of bananas. Just bananas. Thirty thousand pounds.
of Bananas—not no driver now. Just bananas!"”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

“[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."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“In a way, … growing up like this with Harry makes it easier to act in each of the films, because I've been through all the stuff that he's going through, like the hormones, relatively recently. So it's quite fresh in my mind. And then I suppose it's been made easier by the fact I've been playing Harry Potter since I was 12. You get to know the character so well that it makes it easier to act in the long run.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

On character Harry Potter

“I’ve been listening to my father’s songs lately. He was a wonderful composer; I love his songs very much. My father used to say to me, “My son Ranariddh sang my songs the best,” because you had to sing it with your own heart. I used to sing a lot. He didn't like to sing his own songs, so I used to do it.”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

[Post Staff, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/recollections-king-father, Recollections of the King Father, 3 February 2013, 29 June 2015, Phnom Penh Post]

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