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1b81349
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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?"
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Philip Roth |
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7b06139
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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a440da4
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And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratoriu..
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Philip Roth |
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dc006b2
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V p'lnoto si pravo s'm da se sotsializiram kakto i kolkoto nameria za dobre.
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Philip Roth |
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636306a
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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?
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Philip Roth |
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a7b62ec
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What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else, when the result is to wind up so far behind?
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Philip Roth |
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4d6b731
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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cccd688
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To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth! Philip Roth (2004-09-06T16:00:00+00:00). The plot against America (Kindle Locations 4887-4888). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
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Philip Roth |
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a0347ea
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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
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Philip Roth |
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b399b2a
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everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do.
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Philip Roth |
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0e27029
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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8ac8a1b
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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!
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Philip Roth |
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d0e1bfd
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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b173ac1
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How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?
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childhood
ocean
remembering
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Philip Roth |
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3164faa
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That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. 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 ful..
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Philip Roth |
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83c52ce
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Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame - blaming is still ailing, of course, of course - but nonetheless, what it with these Jewish parents, , that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood - saviors and sheer perfection on th..
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Philip Roth |
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68acc6c
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Worship me, she says, worship the mistery of the bleeding goddess, and you do it. You stop at nothing. You lick it. You consume it. You digest it. She penetrates you. What next, David? A glass of her urine. How long before you would have begged for her feces? I'm not against it because it's unhygienic. I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obession everybody wants: 'love'. People t..
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Philip Roth |
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e953ae2
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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 h..
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control-my-mind
indecipherable
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Philip Roth |
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a9053d2
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and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.
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old-age
wholeness
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Philip Roth |
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b377fe2
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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7c87451
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Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
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self-control
silence
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Philip Roth |
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695457c
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Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.
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Philip Roth |
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35aa514
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They worship a Jew, do you know that, Alex? Their whole big-deal religion is based on worshiping someone who was an established Jew at that time. Now how do you like that for stupidity? How do you like that for pulling the wool over the eyes of the public? Jesus Christ, who they go around telling everybody was God, was actually a Jew! And this fact, that absolutely kills me when I have to think about it, nobody else pays any attention to. T..
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Philip Roth |
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80ec1d0
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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!
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Philip Roth |
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0a3b34c
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wklm tGyrt qsmt wjhh, tGyWr jmlh. lm tkn ft@ jmyl@ wHd@, bl knt khmsan w`shryn ft@ jmyl@ mkhtlf@
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Philip Roth |
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93255e2
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E muito dificil ler os classicos; logo a culpa e dos classicos. Hoje o estudante faz valer a sua incapacidade como um privilegio. Eu nao consigo aprender isto, portanto alguma coisa esta errada nisto. E ha especialmente alguma coisa errada com o mau professor que quer ensinar tal materia. Deixou de haver criterios - para so haver opinioes.
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educação
opinião
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Philip Roth |
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cb8f5cd
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Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued by the way he turned events, or hints I had given him about people, into reality--that is, his kind of reality. This obsessive reinvention of the real never stopped, what-could-be having always to top what is. ... I began to wonder which was real, the woman in the book or the one I was pretending to be upstairs. Neither of..
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Philip Roth |
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6185055
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The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.
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Philip Roth |
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cff2f7e
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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
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Philip Roth |
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5d95f6b
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Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could..
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parenthood
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Philip Roth |
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87e6f91
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I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.
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difficulties
flaws
people
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Philip Roth |
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b4a4bac
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Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at the most a curiosity somewhere down in the dingiest town in the minors - precisely where Hot had played during the many years that the nations of the world lived in harmony. But it is one of life's grisly ironies that what is catastrophe for most of mankind, invariably works to the advantage of a few who l..
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Philip Roth |
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a50c48f
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I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so stro..
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Philip Roth |
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b88bc1e
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I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half of my body. Half my face had been peeled away, and everybody would stare in horror for the rest of my life. Or they would stare at the other half, at the half still intact; I could see them smiling, pretending that the flayed half wasn't there, and talking to the half that was. And I could hear my self screaming at them, I could see myself thrusting my hideous side right up into their..
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Philip Roth |
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d35de0a
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You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.
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ideology
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Philip Roth |
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f3fb161
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What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.
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Philip Roth |
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0e263ef
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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2944826
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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.
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Philip Roth |
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c743bad
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Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.
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Philip Roth |
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7a61072
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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?
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Philip Roth |
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43a6b7b
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Jesus Christ, who they go around telling everyone was God, was actually a Jew! and this fact, that absolutely kills me when I have to think about it, nobody else pays attention to. That he was a Jew, and they took a Jew and turned him into some kind of God after he is already dead, and then- this is what can make you absolutely crazy- then the dirty bastards turn around afterwards and who is the first one on their list to persecute? who hav..
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Philip Roth |
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8f08cab
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Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other. The one who looks most American--and he's the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that!
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Philip Roth |
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ca818fc
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You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.
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Philip Roth |
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1cb9c5b
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Always pick a redhead, Ee-oh", Manny said. "he'll give you the best fight in the world. Redhead'll never quit."
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Philip Roth |