Quotes from Philip Roth

There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it - hysteria, ignorance, malice , stupidity, hatred, and fear

the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.

Nathan called all shiksas Maria--the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that.

How could the sidewalk's impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from the flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I'd been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.

Their reasons for asking us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to adults who were striving and improving themselves through us.

I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let's leave it at that.

Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment.

Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.

Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.

Scrivere ti trasforma in una persona che sbaglia sempre. La perversione che ti spinge a continuare è l'illusione che un giorno, forse, l'imbroccherai. Che cos'altro potrebbe farlo? Come per tutti i fenomeni patologici, non ti rovina completamente la vita.

It was the end of all understanding.

Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren.

Bullies love to summarize.

You don't want to be a pauper's wife, though it is all right to be a pauper's girlfriend, especially when you are able, with the pauper's encouragement, to fuck everybody else on the side.

Though sooner or later all husbands resemble Drenka's Matija, do they not?

silencio es la cerca que protege la sabiduría».

Slowly but surely, there's nobody in America willing to speak out against Lindbergh's kissing Hitler's behind." "What about the Democrats?" I asked. "Son, don't ask me about the Democrats. I'm angry enough as it is.

In the gleaming briefcase I carried ten typewritten pages I had written for International Relations the year before on the Balfour Declaration.

I have found in my life that I often phone one person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.

La fente, comme tracée au tire-ligne, cette superbe couture rabattue, qui s'épanouira un jour en pétales et, au fil du temps, deviendra le con de la femme, un pliage d'origami.

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It's the Sundays that keep these couples together. As if Sundays alone could be any worse.