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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5b87b72 | The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else. | Philip Roth | ||
| 0d89717 | What do you do with the kid who can't read? ...Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them--so Coleman believed more often than not. | Philip Roth | ||
| 50d7269 | For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity. | Philip Roth | ||
| 27ae6a9 | I don't know whether you're lying to me or you're telling me the truth. But if you're telling me the truth, that she's dead, it's the best news that I ever heard. Nobody else is going to say this to you. Everybody else is going to commiserate. But I grew up with you. I talk straight to you. The best thing for you is for her to be dead. She did not belong to you. She did not belong to anything you were. She did not belong to anything anyone .. | Philip Roth | ||
| e6f90dc | 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 .. | Philip Roth | ||
| b667fb0 | Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning. | words jungle mastery suspicions | Philip Roth | |
| a761e8c | 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 | ||
| 7746e37 | 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 being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that-well, lucky you. | Philip Roth | ||
| 846ccbb | Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detailthe rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave when you're dead | youth | Philip Roth | |
| e24bf69 | Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it. | communism | Philip Roth | |
| 96a52f0 | She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She wanted life, as all people do, to be logical and linear, as orderly as she made the house and her kitchen and the boy's bureau drawers. She had worked so hard to be in control of a household's destiny. All her life she waited not only for Morty but for the explanation from Morty: Why? The question haunted Sabbath. Why? Why? If.. | Philip Roth | ||
| c7db3d5 | Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me. | masturbation philip-roth-fucking-philip-roth | Philip Roth | |
| a1b1681 | This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building's rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it - a fire escape whose function was not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying to the immense loneliness inherent to liv.. | Philip Roth | ||
| fb0b1d8 | As an artist the nuance is your . Your task is to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You let it in. Otherwise you produc.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 4763f0d | If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this. | Philip Roth | ||
| dbf0ca2 | 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--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 .. | Philip Roth | ||
| 6235963 | This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause no.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 6d01c62 | I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this inst.. | morals fair-play instincts mores obstinacy standards fairness | Philip Roth | |
| 19f087b | he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about "Basel" more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most dis.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 5a977fa | Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death. | existence inevitable-progress inverse-tower-of-babel | Don DeLillo | |
| 2586aba | There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 4ce3a3a | WYATT: What kind of sound waves? DR. BAZELON: Tapes of the cries of baby mice. This sound reaches a level of forty thousand cycles per second. It's the purest thing in nature. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0902cdd | Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?" Do you feel heroic?" | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0e9516a | What people discard could make a nation | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3ca5d1c | How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence. | Don DeLillo | ||
| adc0447 | I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.' 'Feel bad,' he said. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3738ecb | You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285)." | Don DeLillo | ||
| 05ed73b | There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need [...] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions. - Agent Branch (58) | Don DeLillo | ||
| cefbd21 | Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling w.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| d1f749f | Il libro si adatta alla mano, si adatta all'individuo. Il modo in cui tieni in mano un libro e giri le pagine, mani e occhi, i movimenti meccanici per rastrellare la ghiaia su una calda strada di campagna, i segni sulla pagina, e come una pagina e uguale alla successiva eppure completamente diversa, le vite nei libri, le colline che diventano verdi, vecchie colline ondulate che ti facevano sentire che stavi diventando un altro. | leggere libri | Don DeLillo | |
| 279785a | Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown,.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| ca6fb61 | This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 00c7b84 | Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. | Don DeLillo | ||
| e5ed4f7 | Sounds like a boring life." "I hope it lasts forever," she said." | white-noise | Don DeLillo | |
| bc81b40 | Everything was on television last night | Don DeLillo | ||
| fafcc61 | She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life. | Don DeLillo | ||
| d0f30d3 | If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 1f79faf | I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some Eur.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| b8015b1 | We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment. "Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking m.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 1711d95 | He knew time and day of week and wondered when such scraps of data would begin to feel disposable. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 2a61332 | It's almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. Look at it,' he says. 'Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic erupt.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 6566d4b | Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information." [...] "The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fir.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 8f9f7ad | In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 663024c | Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers. | Don DeLillo |