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Book: Rabbit, Run
Quotes of Book: Rabbit, Run

John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals. He wants to go south, down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women. It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico. Wake up with the stars above perfectly spaced in perfect health. But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can't move without killing somebody. Yet the highway sucks him on, and a sign says POTTSTOWN 2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of pool-water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
Come here," he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him. "No," Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny that Ruth won't notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.
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John Updike _ Rabbit, Run
She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There's that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men's dirt-insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish brightness comes from years away.
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