Quotes from Philip Roth

Ascoltavo abitualmente Musical Caravan, lo show di Bill Cook, il sabato sera nella mia stanza buia. Il tema introduttivo era Caravan di Ellington, ritmi afro-orientali molto esotici, molto sofisticati, una cadenza da danza del ventre sulla quale, da sola, valeva la pena di sintonizzarsi; Caravan, nell'interpretazione del Duke, mi faceva sentire piacevolmente nell'illecito anche quando me ne stavo rannicchiato tra le lenzuola fresche di bucato di mia madre.

A whole community perpetually imploring us not to be immoderate and screw up, imploring us to grasp opportunity, exploit our advantages, remember what matters.

They were not the only couple on earth for whom mistrust and mutual aversion furnished the indestructible foundation for a long-standing union.

That's it," he told Shepsie Tirschwell, "I can't live any longer not knowing what will happen tomorrow

She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal.

never would I be able to revive that unfazed sense of security first fostered in a little child by a big, protective republic

To you things that aren't thinkable in intellectual terms aren't worth thinking about.

it, making amends to father is hard work—all that hacking through the undergrowth of stale pathology with the machete of one's guilt.

And virtually every man, woman, and child among them wears that now ubiquitous badge of defiant solidarity, the black-and-white "Where is Lindbergh?" button.

See, American boyfriend? Eventually I am not so stupid a Croatian Catholic shiksa woman. I even learn to say 'ain't.

Everybody's trapped in the thing he does best.

It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the right things. I told her, Look at it from the Darwinian perspective. Anger is to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato.

But what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with.

If I had nothing to say to Henry right off it was because following Lippman's seminar, language didn't really seem my domain any longer. I wasn't exactly a stranger to disputation, but never in my life had I felt so enclosed by a world so contentious, where the argument is enormous and constant and everything turns out to be pro or con, positions taken, positions argued, and everything italicized by indignation and rage.

Yes, that's what made my mother angry, no doubt about it. The ostentatious virility.

Play for the adult is recreation, the renewal of life; play for the child is growth, the gaining of life." Tacked

Homeless, wifeless, mistressless, penniless . . . jump in the cold river and drown.

Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. "Sick?" she asked. "Low self-esteem.

Anonymous inanely stupid letter,' he said. 'Who has ever sent me an anonymous letter? Who capable of rational thought sends anyone an anonymous letter?

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

the perverse senselessness of just remaining, of not going.

What's 'the shit'?" "The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only we go ahead and we live by these pictures. 'That's what she is, that's what he is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—

I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face.

She wanted to collapse and be rescued, and she wanted to be heroic and prevail, and she seemed to hate him most for reminding her, merely by taking it all in, that she could manage neither.