The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (The Plot Against America Quotes)
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“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
“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn’t. Except when it does.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“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 pompous son of a bitch knows everything it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America
“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
