Quotes from Philip Roth

All of European literature springs from a fight.

Nothing illegal is achieved without patience.' Benjamin Franklin.

And he'd thought he was going to gorge himself. It was bursting time again. You great big infant. That you could still believe that it could go on forever. Maybe now you've got a better picture of what's up. Well, let it come. I know what's up. Let it come. Eat breakfast and go. This is amazing moment. It's over

Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons.

How do you have one eyes?" asked Rosa, gently rocking him to and fro. "Por qué?" "La guerra," he moaned. "It cry, glasseye?" "I told you, it wasn't cheap.

Neither a philo- nor an anti-Semite be; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything.

So I said, and quickly reached for my glass so as to duck my disingenuous face and take a bitter drop of brandy on my tongue. But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel's description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, "and blood in his penis," and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy.

You got away from Palestine and the homeland. You got away from Brookline and the relatives. You got away from New York

I'll take your case, son. I believe in your innocence no less than my own." "Thanks, man. You a lawyer?" "No, a Hindu. And you?" "I'm Jewish. But I studied Buddhism.

Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.

Non avevo mai giudicato così severamente un adulto in vita mia - né i miei genitori, né Alvin e neppure lo zio Monty - e non avevo capito, fino a quel momento, come la sfacciata vanità di certi perfetti idioti possa avere un'influenza decisiva sulla sorte delle persone

Todo el mundo está insatisfecho, pero en general no se rompe, y, sobre todo, no rompen las personas que, a su vez, han sido abandonadas, como tú y tu hermano. Cuando pasas por lo que vosotros habéis pasado, valoras muchísimo la estabilidad, probablemente la valoras en exceso. Lo más difícil del mundo es cortar el nudo de tu vida y marcharte.

To respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by anger . . . life just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn.

no, a mí no se me habría pasado por la cabeza abandonar la familia y la fábrica para dedicar todo mi tiempo a escribir, como él hizo.

followed me to the sideboard like Willie Pep chasing some little pisher around the ring.

The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave when you're dead.

but because no evidence had ever been offered Sabbath to persuade him that the dead were anything other than dead. To talk to them, admittedly, was to indulge in the most defensible of irrational human activities

What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.

She's a fighter. She's fine. She's made tremendous strides." True—all the while he has been stoically enduring it she has made tremendous strides by finding it unendurable, by being devastated by it, destroyed by it, and then by denuding herself of it. She doesn't resist the blows the way he does; she receives the blows, falls apart, and when she gets herself up again, decides to make herself over.

The perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy.

Tu?i già không ph?i là má»™t tr?n chi?n; tu?i già là má»™t cuá»™c th?m sát

It is no longer a matter," says Churchill, "of the great American democracy taking military action to save us. The time has come for American citizens to take civil action to save themselves.

what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.