Quotes from Philip Roth

You know what I've come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality.

Pensando na morte de seu irmão - e no ataque mortal do pai - me peguei comparando aquele sorriso seu com um curativo sobre uma ferida. (p.75)

If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach 'Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,' a course that would be over before it began.

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Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes.

There is no life without patience.

Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive.

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing. Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on.

His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond--in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making.

Exhibitionismul inerent unei marturisiri nu face decat sa agraveze suferinta.

È mai possibile che questi individui siano attrezzati di tutto il macchinario necessario, un cervello, una spina dorsale, e le quattro aperture per le orecchie e gli occhi - attrezzatura, Signora Nimkin, che può sbalordire quasi quanto la Tv a colori - eppure viversi tutta l'esistenza senza la minima idea di quelli che sono i sentimenti e i desideri di una persona qualsiasi al di fuori di loro stessi?

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

you will make mistakes on a scale you can't even dream of now—because there is no other way to reach the end.

Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who'd discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading.

Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being!

what I saw was my bewildered father, alone on the darkening street-corner by the park that used to be our paradise, thinking himself and all of Jewry gratuitously disgraced and jeopardized by my inexplicable betrayal.

Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Samsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! You better tell me you're sorry, you, or else! And I don't mean maybe either! I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not-meaning-maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

I wouldn't so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!" Whereupon

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

We return you to the Vice President, who is now addressing the National Sword Swallowers Association. -the psychotics, the sob sisters, the skin merchants, the saboteurs, the self-styled Sapphos, the self-styled Swinburners, the swine, the satyrs, the schizos, the sodomists, the sissies, the screamers, the screwy, the scum, the self-congratulatory self-congratulators, the sensationalists, the snakes in the grass, the sex fiends, the shiftless, the shines, the shaggy, the sickly, the syphilitic-

I'm so drunk my head doesn't even need my neck.

We've sifted through the eight thousand, don't worry about that. And this is the one. This is the murder weapon, no doubt about it. Then the President has been murdered? I cant tell you that right now. But I can assure you that if there has been a murder, this is what did it.