Philip Milton Roth
Philip Roth was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth’s fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark. (Philip Roth Quotes)
“A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“A nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes.”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“Actually, we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them – at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“American society not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property–on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“And as he spoke, I was thinking, ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“And do you fully understand what a story like this story, when it’s published, will mean to people who don’t know us?”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“And I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”
Philip Roth
Exit Ghost
“And talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up a book to worship it or be elevated by it or to lose yourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book.”
Philip Roth
I Married a Communist
“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn’t. Except when it does.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words – words born either of imagination or forthrightness.”
Philip Roth
My Life as a Man
“As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark—or Europe or the Pacific—in the summer of 1944.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“Because you happen to be a writer doesn’t mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron’s intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet’s arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda’s departure would be here before we knew it.”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!” (Philip Roth Quotes)
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don’t need monsters.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth – the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear—that’s your job and mine.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one’s orbit.”
Philip Roth
Exit Ghost
“Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated,”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“He did this despite its causing him to feel keenly not the presence he was seeking but rather the absence of one he’d never seen anywhere other than in photos.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?”
Philip Roth
My Life as a Man
“He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“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? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“He’d tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond–in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“How easy life is when it’s easy and how hard when it’s hard.”
Philip Roth
The Professor of Desire
“How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble?”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you’d loved since you were a boy?”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“I couldn’t imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“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.”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“I don’t know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that’s it.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“I understand.” Too late, but I understand. That we don’t perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you’re a kid and you think you’ve found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don’t normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.” (Philip Roth Quotes)
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“If the weather isn’t bad and it’s a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open pasture at the peak of my hill, from where I can see, from above the treeline, the whole heavenly inventory, stars unfurled in every direction, and, just this week, the planets Jupiter in the east and Mars in the west. It is beyond belief and also a fact, a plain and indisputable fact: that we are born, that this is here. I can think of worse ways to end my day.”
Philip Roth
I Married a Communist
“If you don’t go crazy because of your husband’s vices, you go crazy because of his virtues.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“If you’re from New Jersey,” Nathan had said, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it’s highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they’ll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you’re gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, ‘Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman—I have to make a pee.’ For a New Jersey novelist that’s as much immortality as it’s realistic to hope for.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction,” he said. “You’re a different person.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“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.”
Philip Roth
Exit Ghost
“In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“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!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn’t begin to know what they added up to.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“In the gleaming briefcase I carried ten typewritten pages I had written for International Relations the year before on the Balfour Declaration.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“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?”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath’s sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“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.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“It’s the Sundays that keep these couples together. As if Sundays alone could be any worse.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“It’s a big deal for working people to buy a diamond,” he told his sons, “no matter how small. wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber — he’s a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“It’s a hard thing to be a Jew… it’s a harder thing to stay one.”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“My imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.”
Philip Roth
Deception
“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. It’s a very risky game. A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That’s what you get for a couplet.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark’s old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth. Back when”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“No, I won’t do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“Nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“Now, I’m very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody’s defenseless against something, and that’s it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else.” (Philip Roth Quotes)
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“Old age isn’t a battle: old age is a massacre.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love.”
Philip Roth
Deception
“Other people’s weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“People are unjust to anger — it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“People were standing up everywhere shouting, “This is me! This is me!” Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, “This isn’t me! This isn’t me!” They would if they had any decency. “This isn’t me!” Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Perhaps,’ I wearily suggest, ‘reading is the opiate of the educated classes.’ ‘Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?’ he says, lighting up a new cigar.”
Philip Roth
The Professor of Desire
“Play for the adult is recreation, the renewal of life; play for the child is growth, the gaining of life.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other–they are in an antagonistic relationship.”
Philip Roth
I Married a Communist
“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“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!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“Talking like this seemed to him to be neither pleasant nor unpleasant — it was a pouring forth that before long he could not control, neither an unburdening nor a remedy so much as an exile’s painful visit to the irreclaimable homeland, the beloved birthplace that was the site of his undoing.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“Talking to Marcia about their engagement, he was almost able to look the other way and rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times.”
“The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“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 about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“The fear was everywhere, the look was everywhere, in the eyes of our protectors especially, the look that comes in the split second after you have locked the door and realize you don’t have the key. We had never before observed the adults all helplessly thinking the same thoughts. The strongest among them did their best to be calm and brave and to sound realistic when they told us that our worries would soon be over and the regular round of life restored, but when they turned on the news they were devastated by the speed with which everything dreadful was happening.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“The joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open. ”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“The pleasure isn’t in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first came upon Lonoff’s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
“There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“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.” (Philip Roth Quotes)
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“There was no other explanation for such an illness in a man otherwise so young and fit. It was the consequence of failing to find the ruthlessness to take what he wanted instead of capitulating to what he should do.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“There’s no remaking reality… Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“Things don’t have to reach a peak. They can just go on. You do want to make a narrative out of it, with progress and momentum and dramatic peaks and then a resolution. You seem to see life as having a beginning, a middle, an ending, all of them linked together with something bearing your name. But it isn’t necessary to give things a shape. You can yield to them too. No goals–just letting things take their own course. You must begin to see it as it is: there are insoluble problems in life, and this is one.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“This man did not deal in fairy tales. You could see that as soon as you walked into his office. Schevitz was somebody who liked to be proved right, somebody whose wish to prevail was his vocation.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Though I’d never forgotten Alan, I hadn’t uttered his name aloud in the many years since he’d died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“To those not yet old, being old means you’ve been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it’s just an everyday fact that one’s life is at stake.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“Too late, but I understand. That we don’t perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that — of just that.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it – either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.”
Philip Roth
Everyman
“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”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen – there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
“What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“What his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“Who are the new people when you do meet them? They’re the same old people in masks. There’s nothing new about them at all. They’re people.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
“Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education?”
Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“Why is the smallest thing I do for pleasure immediately illicit—while the rest of the world rolls laughing in the mud! Pig? She ought to see the charges and complaints that are filed in my office in a single morning: what people do to one another, out of greed and hatred! For dough! For power! For spite! For nothing!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you – life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“You go to someone and you think, ‘I’ll tell him this.’ But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later–you’ve relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.”
Philip Roth
Nemesis
“You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government.”
Philip Roth
Indignation
“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature.”
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
“You take off your clothes and you’re in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you’ve concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that’s what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.”
Philip Roth
The Human Stain
“You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.”
Philip Roth
The Dying Animal
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