Quotes from Philip Roth

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it.

The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else.

and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.

Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harbouring for you for all these years?

In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!

The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.

What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.

Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before.

Nothing keeps its promise.

What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.

And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, the underside of love.

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.

He calls his brother. it is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but what can he do? When it comes to consolation it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others.

In the ass is how you create loyalty.

War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night