Quotes from Philip Roth

we retained no allegiance, sentimental or otherwise, to those Old World countries that we had never been welcome in and that we had no intention of ever returning to.

The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

Había aprendido lo peor de las lecciones que puede dar la vida: la de que carece de sentido. Y cuando sucede tal cosa, la felicidad nunca vuelve a ser espontánea, sino que es artificial e, incluso entonces, se compra el precio de un obstinado distanciamiento de uno mismo y de su historia.

Good. Hurry. Into insanity. Off with your clothes and into the bayous. Into the chocolate-milk-colored water filled with dead old trees.

It was puzzling to own trees—they were not owned the way a business is owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

And yet nothing of what he surmised meant a goddamn thing. None of his great ideas disposed of a single one of her difficulties.

Ideological tyranny. It's the disease of the century. The ideology institutionalizes the pathology.

As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't in fact, what binds one to everyone else.

Por outro lado, é justamente o que há de normal nos funerais o que os torna mais dolorosos, mais um registro da realidade da morte que avassala tudo.

She had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire. This woman was in me before she even appeared.

For those who prefer a fairy tale to life, a moral: "Reality," concludes the embittered professor who for reasons unbeknown to himself became a female breast, "has style.

The status conferred by economic and vocational advantage inclined them to believe that those who lacked their prestige were rebuffed by the larger society more because of insular clannishness than because of any pronounced taste for exclusiveness on the part of the Christian majority, and that neighborhoods like ours were less the result of discrimination than its breeding grounds.

Lev-en-thal to Le-vov! Lev-en-thal to Le-vov!" was an anapest

They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But the white Israelis have taught them that, too—how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs.

an aging man imprisoned on Goli Otok as an enemy of the regime

My second Jewish courtroom in two days. Jewish judges. Jewish laws. Jewish flags. And non-Jewish defendants. Courtrooms such as Jews had envisioned in their fantasies for many hundreds of years, answering longings even more unimaginable than those for an army or a state. One day we will determine justice!

But, alas, I could not lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life.

When you're beguiled it helps not to think too much and just to let yourself enjoy the beguilement.

The professors are always schlepping in Swift to defend some farsbtunkeneh nobody.

There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear.

But it is Hitler to whom the entire world must be grateful tonight for striking at the Soviet Union.

Catholic and Italian boys whose fathers worked on the docks at the port

If there was ever anything to know, now he knew he never had known it.