Quotes from Philip Roth

Perchè solo quando scopi riesci a vendicarti, anche se solo per un momento, di tutto ciò che non ami nella vita e di tutte le cose che nella vita ti hanno sconfitto. Solo allora sei più nettamente vivo e più nettamente te stesso. [...] Il sesso non è semplice frizione e divertimento superficiale. Il sesso è anche la vendetta sulla morte.

The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers.

No one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and loss. Even those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery, if not sometimes more.

Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever.

Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream.

Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds - as though through fucking I will discover America.

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

The accident of a wrong turn had brought me there, and all I did by getting out of the car and entering the cemetery to find her grave was to bow to its impelling force. My mother and the other dead had been brought here by the impelling force of what was, after all, a more unlikely accident–having once lived

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself.

Sì, siamo soli, profondamente soli, e in serbo per noi, sempre, c'è uno strato di solitudine ancora più profondo. Non c'è nulla che possiamo fare per liberarcene. No, la solitudine non dovrebbe stupirci, per sorprendente che possa essere farne l'esperienza. Puoi cercare di tirar fuori tutto quello che hai dentro, ma allora non sarai altro che questo: vuoto e solo anziché pieno e solo.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; it is with them that I take those walks in the country at the end of the day. I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Playful Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer Sheerness. From the last, however, I get nothing; he just wrings my heart and leaves me speechless.

Llega un momento, como me llegó a mí hace unos meses, en que se halla uno en tal estado de desamparo y confusión, que no logra comprender lo que otrora resultaba obvio: por qué hago lo que hago, por qué vivo donde vivo, por qué comparto mi vida con quien la comparto.

Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.

I am a breast. A Phenomenon that has been vastly described to me as a massive hormonal influx, a endocrinopathic catastrophe and/or a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes took place within my body between midnight and 4 A.M. on February 18, 1971, and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form.

I don't necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.

Un piccolissimo simbolo, se ce ne fosse stato bisogno, del milione di circostanze della vita altrui, di quella bufera di dettagli che formano il guazzabuglio di una biografia umana: un piccolissimo simbolo che mi ricordava perchè la nostra comprensione della gente dev'essere sempre, per forza, nel migliore dei casi, difettosa.

Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government.

The drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.