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Philip Roth

Philip Roth Quotes

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Famous Philip Roth Quotes

“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 flashing bullshit of this world.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWorldIdeasMightKnow HowThis WorldOughtStandingBullshitDecencyShoutingStood UpThis Is Me
Author:Philip Roth
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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.”

PeopleMenHumansCharacterStandardsRelationCompetitionPropertyPossessionEnvyDeniedUnfairGrossSanctionsRivalryAmerican SocietyHappiness And Success
Author:Philip Roth
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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.”

ThinkingWayWantFeelsMaySoulKidsFoundForceFeltBoysToo MuchStreetsPleaseMatesExplainingSoul MateCourtshipEagernessSaying Too Much
Book:The Human Stain: A Novel
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“a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.”

ThinkingMenWaySeemsJobsLife IsFatherBeliefEnergyEasySeriousSonDutyAmbitionCarefulDespiteFriendlyFedsKeep GoingThings In LifeRight WayLimitlessCompoundsWrong WayFed UpUnshakableSerious Things
Author:Philip Roth
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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 fingerprintit’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 same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania”

PersonsMatterRealitySeemsRememberForgetWonderToo MuchHappenedThousandTenMarkTablesPatternsDinnerKitchenCherishBiographiesIdentificationDistinctiveKitchen TableExcursions
Book:American Pastoral
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“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 not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration”

PeopleWayHappensDiesCausesBehindsArgumentBreathsDrawingYesterdayAdmirationAmusementFlawedUnbearableSympatheticLimousines
Book:American Pastoral
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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?”

IfsDreamArtistStudentsDependsMirrorsDetachmentNarcissist
Author:Philip Roth
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“Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!”

WritingFirstsWellsArtDesireArtistGriefVirtueAchieveEffectsTerribleProveVicesTemptationAestheticMasteryIdealismOutrageSinister
Book:I Married a Communist
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