Quotes from Philip Roth

The immensity of your isolation is horrifying

Quimper. Beyond quimper.

Homestead 42 is being aided and abetted by the most respectable of America's robber barons—but don't worry, they'll be rewarded in giveaway tax breaks by Lindbergh's Republican henchmen in the next pro-greed Congress.

in truth nothing lives in me life my life.

Everybody masturbates in libraries. That's what they're for.

I don't think you ever gave isolation a real shot. It's the best preparation I know of for death.

Destiny had become perfectly understandable while everything unenigmatic, such as standing for the photograph in the third row back, with my one arm on the shoulder of Marshall Goldstein ("Children 39, 37. Grandchildren 8, 6") and my other on the shoulder of Stanley Wernikoff ("Children 39, 38. Grandchildren 5, 2, 8 mo."), had become inexplicable.

He is survived by the ghost of his mother; Yetta, of Beth Something-or-other Cemetery, Neptune, New Jersey, who haunted him unceasingly during the last year of his life.

Grandpa wasn't a Jewish nationalist—he was a Jewish humanist, a spiritual, believing Jew, who complained not in an antique tongue called Hebrew but in colorful, rich, vernacular Yiddish.

The second crazy wife. Was there any other kind?

in truth nothing lives in me like my life.

A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit—a panther ready to pounce.

It is from his mother that Mr. Sabbath inherited his own ability never to get over anything.

It had cost him dearly to clear a space where he could exist in the world as antagonistically as he liked.

You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional—and enviable, and hateable—to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you're well advised to develop a sense of humor.

Meu pai era dono de botequim, porém insistia que era preciso escolher as palavras com precisão, e nisso sou como ele. As palavras têm significados — meu pai só estudou até a sétima série, mas até ele sabia disso. Atrás do balcão ele guardava duas coisas pra resolver discussões entre seus clientes: um porrete e um dicionário.

Pero en cuanto quieres apasionadamente lo que se encuentra más allá de tu alcance, estás listo para la frustración, te estás preparando para cuando te obliguen a ponerte de rodillas.

Jewish resentment could be just as bad as the Irish resentment.

You learn by sixty to accept in a sporting spirit the derision of virtuous bystanders.

I was suddenly alarmed about leaving this attractive forty-five-year-old woman alone with him, dead though she was.

Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else.

fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

sostuvieron a base de falsas esperanzas y al final nos enviaron a la muerte por vía férrea.

I curled myself around these dreams and I began to be happy.