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dd878ba
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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d4e03c4
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You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and ..
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truth
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Philip Roth |
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34abb0d
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He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.
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Philip Roth |
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106e4b8
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You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
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intelligence
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Philip Roth |
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425c947
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The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
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Philip Roth |
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bf12da6
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Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
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Philip Roth |
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0230c5c
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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0d2a1b2
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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ea78b74
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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7704ab1
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These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age--they're drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela's case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woma..
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submission
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Philip Roth |
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7f3d92f
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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103e574
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How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.
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Philip Roth |
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b177bdd
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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a2371b8
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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13bd1ea
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Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
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life
truth
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Philip Roth |
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7758094
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nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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Philip Roth |
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287be1b
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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..
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Philip Roth |
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7e0fd65
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You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, ge..
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Philip Roth |
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8e03e74
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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7b27e09
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You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and ..
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Philip Roth |
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441c7fe
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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17ac72f
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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
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Philip Roth |
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00e21eb
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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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Philip Roth |
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155535f
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Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even that your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. I..
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Philip Roth |
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4c7960f
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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7e119d6
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Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre.
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Philip Roth |
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c90a0a5
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You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
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Philip Roth |
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2f8b79f
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I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...
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Philip Roth |
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0adea2a
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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c2dcc3f
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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75e86f4
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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673ff33
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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8b5a654
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And since we don't just forget things because they don't matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint's, it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very ..
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memory-loss
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Philip Roth |
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62fb20c
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what was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to tha..
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Philip Roth |
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4159589
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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17ebded
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Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows... How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliche that'..
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Philip Roth |
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881cad9
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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jewish
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Philip Roth |
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02a81aa
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There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.
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Philip Roth |
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5e4db60
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In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
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Philip Roth |
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44e1cd1
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Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.
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Philip Roth |
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c57eb6d
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And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
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Philip Roth |
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ae34ea5
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I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface
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Philip Roth |
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39fd656
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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!
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Philip Roth |
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b57a2d3
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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."
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Philip Roth |