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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9c0aecf | I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous story, and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author's perversity than with their own. | professional-life to-fortify-and-defend-myself | Philip Roth | |
| 2ced2c3 | Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book! | ludicrous-character | Philip Roth | |
| 237c5c7 | Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. | Philip Roth | ||
| b364c74 | a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. | Philip Roth | ||
| 07b4275 | I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, "Hallelujah!" and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only gape at the sight of nothing less than the h.. | convert-to-the-old-comedy one-and-only-comic-almighty | Philip Roth | |
| efdd051 | Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, th.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 5554373 | But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself. | Philip Roth | ||
| 9d061df | Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his money making money. | Philip Roth | ||
| ebab62f | All this, this luck - what did it mean? Coming so suddenly, and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune. | Philip Roth | ||
| 80675e9 | Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions. | Philip Roth | ||
| a097de6 | I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since. | Philip Roth | ||
| 2b1790f | You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman." Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it." | Philip Roth | ||
| 8b22951 | Nathan called all shiksas Maria--the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that. | Philip Roth | ||
| 7a4deca | If you're from New Jersey," Nathan had said, "and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it's highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you're gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, 'S.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 1dcfc97 | I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it. | Philip Roth | ||
| 986e4f9 | His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, "I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one." "Good. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left." | Philip Roth | ||
| b7a2116 | Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here -- just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it. | Philip Roth | ||
| 75b74c7 | It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity,... | Philip Roth | ||
| 27d57a6 | Gogol, Kafka y compania... va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino. | Philip Roth | ||
| a4cf5c2 | In a burst of calculated sincerity--miscalculated sincerity, it turns out--I tell one of the girls how the sight of her breasts pressing against her arms had led me to wish I were those arms. And is this so different, I ask, pushing on with the charm, from Romeo, beneath Juliet's balcony, whispering, "See! How she leans her cheek upon her hand:/ O! That I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek." Apparently it is quite d.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 472569c | What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else's idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants .. | Philip Roth | ||
| cb5e666 | This ordinarily even-tempered man struck furiously at his heart like some fanatic at prayer, and, assailed by remorse not just for this mistake but for all his mistakes, all the ineradicable, stupid, inescapable mistakes -- swept away by the misery of his limitations yet acting as if life's every incomprehensible contingency were of his making | Philip Roth | ||
| 3c07d80 | Pensando na morte de seu irmao - e no ataque mortal do pai - me peguei comparando aquele sorriso seu com um curativo sobre uma ferida. (p.75) | Philip Roth | ||
| b579452 | Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes. | Philip Roth | ||
| 449cc6b | E mai possibile che questi individui siano attrezzati di tutto il macchinario necessario, un cervello, una spina dorsale, e le quattro aperture per le orecchie e gli occhi - attrezzatura, Signora Nimkin, che puo sbalordire quasi quanto la Tv a colori - eppure viversi tutta l'esistenza senza la minima idea di quelli che sono i sentimenti e i desideri di una persona qualsiasi al di fuori di loro stessi? | Philip Roth | ||
| cbe333e | Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated, | Philip Roth | ||
| 8db39de | ljsd yHwy lkthyrmn qSS lHy@ tmm mthl lmkh . dn 'wh bryn | Philip Roth | ||
| e306cd6 | How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? | Philip Roth | ||
| ed79152 | As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark--or Europe or the Pacific--in the summer of 1944. | Philip Roth | ||
| 9f8d321 | Glorious life ending. There must have been a moment when his son had gasped for air, the last time, as Jesus must. But as Jesus had risen, he wanted his son to rise up, organs and spirit and mind intact, and everything to be as it had been not so long ago. | Oscar Hijuelos | ||
| 0a08cb9 | we obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us. | John Cheever | ||
| 986ece0 | These napkins are more holy than righteous," Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns." | hoary-puns napkins | John Cheever | |
| 12559d8 | But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship. | John Cheever | ||
| fb943d2 | If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocri.. | Andrew Klavan | ||
| 6fa51f2 | Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth? | John Cheever | ||
| 502cb88 | I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. | writing | John Cheever | |
| f231f7f | They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. | John Cheever | ||
| a55ad2c | This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. | John Cheever | ||
| a54479f | I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; to celebrate life is.. | earth journals | John Cheever | |
| 68e72b4 | There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. "Are you all right, darling?" he asked. "Yes," a woman said wearily. "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself anymore. Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself. I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor's bills are so awful already, but I just.. | John Cheever | ||
| 107f1eb | Son of a stadium full of bitches. | D.B.C. Pierre | ||
| 8c48ee6 | We never have time, do we, for all that we don't exactly want to do. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 3f97b26 | So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 71cbbc8 | I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better. | friendships men-and-women | A.S. Byatt |