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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bb93cb2 | Great artists make the entire world their home. | travel world | Chaim Potok | |
| 70a07c0 | We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto. | Chaim Potok | ||
| f960884 | Weeks of longing and solitude: twin muses of creation. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 84c7b0b | Jestlize se chces dotknout srdce nejakeho cloveka, musis videt jeho tvar. Do duse se nedostanes telefonem. | srdce | Chaim Potok | |
| 73ce0e2 | I hated and loved him in turns, as witches will do, for our hearts are strange and inexplicable. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| b7d15bd | Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was to find in her always the best--of herself, himself, and all the world. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 24d210b | The beer got him, and, for a moment, a rush of idiot compassion urged him to hug a pinch-faced man in brown overalls who sat on a stool surrounded by primitive paintings of Jesus engaged in various farm chores (milking a cow, driving a tractor, killing a hog), but the desire to comfort the untalented, the misguided, left Wally before he could act. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 22033e1 | everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 6c5eef0 | His hair was think and curly and reddish-brown, his eyes a clear ice blue; Ramona had told him many times that she could see the sky in them, clouds when he was angry and rain when he was sad. Now, if she had looked into his eyes closely enough, she might've seen the approaching storm. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| b89fc40 | There was lightning behind Mr. Sayre's eyes, and it was looking for a place to strike. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| ee4904a | The sharp white steeple of the Hawthorne First Baptist Church stuck up through the leafless trees like an admonishing finger. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| b7dcfc5 | I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me." | Philip Roth | ||
| de89cf4 | There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing and you're only right. Everything is a target; you're on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right. | Philip Roth | ||
| d7c7d71 | Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe! | Philip Roth | ||
| ff6bb63 | If the weather isn't bad and it's a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open pasture at the peak of my hill, from where I can see, from above the treeline, the whole heavenly inventory, stars unfurled in every direction, and, just this week, the planets Jupiter in the east and Mars in the west. It is beyond belief and .. | Philip Roth | ||
| 2250dd0 | The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a "Jewish writer, " but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling o.. | Hana Wirth-Nesher | ||
| 28451c7 | Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostat.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 6796e62 | Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it. | writing ego writers | Zia Haider Rahman | |
| 475af1f | What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say -- so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that ha.. | loneliness phones | Philip Roth | |
| fe7a4ac | No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction. | Philip Roth | ||
| 3ab7c69 | Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? | Philip Roth | ||
| 2367753 | In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to. | Philip Roth | ||
| 1a4abd8 | I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerm.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 9cd675e | Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life. | writting | Philip Roth | |
| b275d0c | 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! | writer writing | Philip Roth | |
| 1db085d | Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creamining in their pre-faded jeans over Historical New England, dreaming the old agrarian dream in their rent-a-car convertible | Philip Roth | ||
| 6123a54 | they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist. | dreadful-a-novelist | Philip Roth | |
| 2c742e7 | But to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are. | Philip Roth | ||
| 7320f7b | time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse... there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. | Philip Roth | ||
| 52ee07f | Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar. | Philip Roth | ||
| 2adc3fc | But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising--didn't make it to the airport,...--and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug .. | kike | Philip Roth | |
| 020c0f1 | You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank-like 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 yet you.. | illusion truth judgement | Philip Roth | |
| 213a912 | We're the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn't with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawlin.. | Philip Roth | ||
| e20d631 | In the ass is how you create loyalty. | Philip Roth | ||
| 26f95aa | No importa cuanto sepas, no importa cuanto pienses, no importa cuanto maquines, finjas y planees, no estas por encima del sexo. Es un juego muy arriesgado. Uno no tendria dos tercios de los problemas que tiene si no corriera el albur de la jodienda. El sexo es lo que desordena nuestras vidas normalmente ordenadas. | Philip Roth | ||
| 7075efe | D`f lakhryn qd yHTWmk blqdr ldhy tstTy` qwthm 'n tf`l dhlk | Philip Roth | ||
| 0e06f38 | nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger. | Philip Roth | ||
| 269daac | All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As | Philip Roth | ||
| 6741f84 | Sera que considero esta inquietacao, este desvario, como uma doenca - ou como um talento? Como ambos? Pode ser. Ou sera que e apenas um meio de fuga? Olhe, pelo menos nao me encontro casado, aos trinta e poucos, com uma criatura decente, cujo corpo deixou de ter para mim qualquer interesse genuino - pelo menos nao tenho de ir para cama todas as noites com alguem que vez por outra marreto por obrigacao, ao inves de desejo. Quero referir-me a.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 873c4db | Forse e tutto cio che sono realmente: un leccatore di figa, una bocca schiava del buco femminile. Lecca! E cosi sia! Forse la soluzione piu saggia per me e vivere a quattro zampe! Strisciare attraverso la vita ingozzandomi di passera, lasciando che a raddrizzare i torti e a fare i padri di famiglia siano le creature erette! | Philip Roth | ||
| 7dd1f52 | I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I'M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE'S WHAT I'LL DO FOR YOU. I'LL GIVE YOU THE BAPTISM. THAT'S ALL I CAN DO FOR YOU. | Philip Roth | ||
| 10d5c5d | The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. | Philip Roth | ||
| 4d66ff7 | The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's 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. | wrong | Philip Roth | |
| b78932b | For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she "hate" this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the "rotten system" that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her.. | Philip Roth |