Quotes by Philip Roth

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”

“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 s...”

“And since we dont just forget things because they dont matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings a...”

“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?”

“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 pri...”

“Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I ...”

“A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.”

“In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.”

“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!”

“Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that was the dream of his life.”

“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 min...”

“What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say so much so pressing that it couldnt wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone a...”

“This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More ...”

“Ones story isnt a skin to be shed its inescapable, ones body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story thats at once ...”

“In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees”

“Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming...”

“How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?”

“Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is...”

“Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded...”