Quotes from Philip Roth

Every wife should have a husband like Norman, revere a husband like Norman instead of battering on his decency with her low-minded delights.

In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

The last kiss is given to the void.

Someone to whom the tangible and the immediate are repugnant, to whom only the illusion is fully real.

Depraved? Officer Balich, you are too old to idealize your parents.

As a family they still flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself. No wonder he couldn't shut up.

Ao contrário da fatwa proclamada por Khomeini, que condenou à morte Salman Rushdie, a castração corretiva sonhada por Buckley não vinha acompanhada de nenhum incentivo financeiro para possíveis executores. No entanto, foi ditada por um espírito tão exigente quanto o do aiatolá, e em nome de ideais tão elevados quanto os dele.

A emoção principal, como já disse, era o desejo ardente. E ainda é. Não há alívio para esse desejo nem para a minha noção de mim mesmo como suplicante. Está claro: temo-lo quando estamos com ela e temo-lo quando estamos sem ela. Sendo assim, quem terminou? Fui eu, não indo à festa, ou foi ela ao aproveitar o facto de eu não ter ido?

I was ready to learn of the liberties a boy from an exemplary household could take when he stopped working to please everyone with his juvenile purity and discovered the guilty enjoyment of secretly acting on his own. -nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind.

Foi o verão em que — pela bilionésima vez — o caos, a brutalidade, a bagunça se revelaram mais sutis do que a ideologia ou a moralidade. Foi o versão em que o pênis de um presidente esteve na cabeça de todos, e a vida, com toda a sua pureza desavergonhada, mais uma vez confundiu todo o país.

Puppets can fly, levitate, twirl, but only people and marionettes are confined to running and walking.

TUNNEL, TURNPIKE, parkway—the shore! Sixty-five minutes south and there it was!

Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The

What do you do with the kid who can't read?... You find a pay phone as fast as you can and rectify your idiotic mistake.

A phone at a cemetery would be ringing off the hook. If you could get them on the phone . .

O my America of the plains and the mountains and the valleys and the rivers and the canyons... It is with j'ust such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock.

so conspicuous was his abhorrence of "rebellious insolence" that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself.

Alienated her completely, managed even to arouse her repugnance by overplaying how unmenacing, unfrightening an old fuddy-duddy he was. And deprived her of the spotlight.

More meaning than was necessary was in the nature of things.

It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

Isn't that what the Mafia does? You give somebody something they can't talk about. Then you've got them.' 'You involve them in a mutual transgression, and you have a mutual corruption. Sure.' So his problem is that he's insufficiently corrupt.' 'Oh, yes. Absolutely. And unsophisticated.

You are the strangest child," she told me. "I had no idea," she said. "I didn't begin to know.

Las décadas transcurridas desde los años sesenta han llevado a cabo una notable tarea en el acabado de la revolución sexual.