Quotes from Philip Roth

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. It was our job to love them.

The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it—either that or you were sunk.

you're as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets;

Pyorrhea. Gingivitis. Swollen gums. One schmutzig mouth after another. Schmutz is her métier.

Porque é em momentos assim que amamos as pessoas, quando as vemos decididas a enfrentar o pior. Não corajosas. Não heróicas. Simplesmente decididas.

Noi lasciamo una macchia, lasciamo una traccia, lasciamo la nostra impronta.

Nulla, nulla viene mai detto una volta sola - nulla!

calmly and as sensibly

Hämningar växer inte på träd förstår ni - det behövs tålamod, det behövs koncentration, det behövs en hängiven och självuppoffrande förälder och ett hårt arbetande, uppmärksamt litet barn för att på bara några år skapa en riktigt hämmad och knuten och förstoppad människa.

About my breasts giving me confidence? I know I have something people will like, people will be jealous of, people will want. To have the confidence that you will be wanted - that's what confidence is. Confidence that you will be approved of, thought well of, desired. If you know that, then you're confindent.

the academic world, the intellectual world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said was apparently looked on with admiration.

Losing the secret, he feels like a boy again. The boy he'd been before he had the secret. A kind of imp again. He gets from all her naturalness the pleasure and ease of being natural himself. If you're going to be a knight and a hero, you're armored, and what he gets now is the pleasure of being unarmored.

Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him.

modest, serious, chaste, loyal, naive, undiscourageable, hard-working, soft-spoken, courageous, a brilliant athlete, a beautiful, austere boy.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, 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. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

Elsewhere is wherever you are;

We are people who fantasize too much to begin with. We read too much, we feel too much, we fantasize too much - we want all the wrong things!

Il coula sans venir voir le coup, sans jamais pressentir l'issue, avide au contraire de s'assouvir encore, mais il ne se réveilla pas. Arrêt cardiaque. Il n'était plus. Affranchi de l'être, entré dans le nulle part, sans même en avoir conscience. Comme il le craignait depuis le début.

I'm talking to a virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes. Yet that is what it is to be in life, isn't it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time - and if it does, there goes life and the instability that is life.

The sad inventory of his domestic bounty.

Jews have a reputation for being intelligent, and they are intelligent. The only place I have ever been where all the Jews are stupid is Israel.

Calm." "If Yahweh wanted me to be calm, he would have made me a goy. Four days. No. Now." "We can't," she whispered. "Come Saturday—I'll give you a periodontal probe.

You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you.

When Lindbergh wrote proudly of "our inheritance of European blood," when he warned against "dilution by foreign races" and "the infiltration of inferior blood" (all phrases that turn up in diary entries from those years), he was recording personal convictions shared by a sizable portion of America First's rank-and-file membership as well