Quotes from book
Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike.

John Updike photo

“The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

John Updike photo

“… hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

John Updike photo

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

John Updike photo

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

John Updike photo

“He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world…”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

John Updike photo

“The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)
Context: He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

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