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Philip Roth

Philip Roth Books

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Everyman

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Exit Ghost

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Indignation

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Nemesis

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Our Gang

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The Breast

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The Facts

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The Humbling

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Related Quotes

“L'umano desiderio di un principio, una parte di mezzo e una fine - e una fine adeguata, come grandezza, a quel principio e a quella parte di mezzo - si realizzava così completamente soltanto nella materia insegnata da Coleman all'Athena College. Ma al di fuori della tragedia classica del quinto secolo a.C. aspettarsi un compimento, per non dire una giusta e perfetta conclusione, significa, per un adulto, cullarsi in una stolta illusione.”

HumanAmericanTrilogy3RothStain
Book:The Human Stain
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“Questo è tutto ciò che Faunia, nel suo tono freddo e distaccato, stava dicendo alla ragazza che nutriva il serpente: noi lasciamo una macchia, lasciamo una traccia, lasciamo la nostra impronta. Impurità, crudeltà, abuso, errore, escremento, seme: non c'è altro mezzo per essere qui. Nulla a che fare con la disobbedienza. Nulla a che fare con la grazia o la salvezza o la redenzione. E' in ognuno di noi. Insita. Inerente. Qualificante. La macchia che esiste prima del suo segno. Che esiste senza il segno. La macchia così intrinseca che non richiede un segno. La macchia che precede la disobbedienza, che comprende la disobbedienza e frustra ogni spiegazione o ogni comprensione. Ecco perché ogni purificazione è uno scherzo. Uno scherzo crudele, se è per questo. La fantasia della purezza è terrificante. E' folle. Cos'è questa brama di purificazione, se non l'aggiunta di nuove impurità? Della macchia Faunia diceva soltanto che era inevitabile. Questo, ovviamente, era il suo punto di vista: siamo creature irrimediabilmente macchiate. Rassegnata all'orribile, elementare imperfezione.”

HumanAmericanTrilogy3RothStain
Book:The Human Stain
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“La performance sincera è tutto. Sincera e vuota, completamente vuota. La sincerità che va in tutte le direzioni. La sincerità che è peggio della falsità e l'innocenza che è peggio della corruzione. Tutta l'avidità che si nasconde sotto la sincerità. E sotto il gergo. Questo splendido linguaggio che hanno tutti - in cui sembrano credere -, queste chiacchiere sulla loro "mancanza di autovalorizzazione", quando l'unica cosa di cui sono sempre convinti, in realtà, è di avere diritto a tutto. L'impudenza la chiamano tenerezza, e la crudeltà è camuffata da "autostima" perduta. Anche Hitler mancava di autostima. Era il suo problema.”

HumanAmericanTrilogy3RothStain
Book:The Human Stain
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“Rapture itself, to reach out my hand and give him a laugh, a body, a voice, a life with some of the fun in it of being alive, the fun of existing that even a flea must feel, the pleasure of existence, pure and simple, that practically anyone this side of the cancer ward gets a glimmer of occasionally, uninspiring as his fortunes overall may be. Here, Mort, what we call "a life," the way we call the sky "the sky" and the sun "the sun." How nonchalant we are. Here, brother, a living soul - for whatever it's worth, take mine!”

Life And Living
Author:Philip Roth
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“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike 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 never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... 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.”

TruthSignificant
Book:American Pastoral
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“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.”

Truth
Book:The Ghost Writer
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“...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 instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”

StandardsEthicsMoralsFairnessObstinacyInstinctsFair PlayMores
Book:The Plot Against America
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“I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? "You seem like a very nice person Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?" Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out towards God. Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of your face...”

HumourJew
Book:Portnoy’s Complaint
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“The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smartersmarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations beforeout of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.”

LifeAmerican Dream
Book:American Pastoral
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“They sat on fold-up beach chairs and were talking about polio. The older ones, like his grandmother, had lived through the city's 1916 epidemic and were lamenting the fact that in the intervening years science had been unable to find a cure for the disease or come up with an idea of how to prevent it. Look at Weequahic, they said, as clean and sanitary as any section in the city, and it's the worst hit. There was talk, somebody said, of keeping the colored cleaning women from coming to the neighborhood for fear that they carried the polio germs up from the slums. Somebody else said that in his estimation the disease was spread by money, by paper money passing from hand to hand. The important thing, he said, was always to wash your hands after you handled paper money or coins. What about the mail, someone else said, you don't think it could be spread by the mail? What are you going to do, somebody retorted, suspend delivering the mail? The whole city would come to a halt.”

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Book:Nemesis
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“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.”

WordsMasteryJungleSuspicionsFiring Squad
Book:Operation Shylock: A Confession
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“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 highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced....”

AristophanesConvert To The Old ComedyOne And Only Comic Almighty
Book:Operation Shylock: A Confession
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“It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was cray. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous--this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn't crazy--deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy...and there, that, deceit, there was the key to my confusion. Of course!”

CrazyDeceitDeludedResoluteVengeful
Book:Operation Shylock: A Confession
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“Y la elección de Lindbergh me había dejado muy claro que el despliegue de lo imprevisto estaba en todas partes. Lo impecablemente imprevisto, que había dado un vuelco erróneo, era lo que en la escuela estudiábamos como “historia”, una historia inocua donde todo lo inesperado en su época está registrado en la página como inevitable. El terror de lo imprevisto es lo que oculta la ciencia de la historia, que transforma el desaire en épica.”

Historia
Book:The Plot Against America
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“L'idea che Coleman si era fatto di lei era di una persona troppo giovane per quel posto, troppo piena di contraddizioni irrisolte, un po' troppo presuntuosa e, al tempo stesso, fintamente umile come una bambina, una bimba dotata di scarso autocontrollo, pronta a reagire al primo sintomo di disapprovazione, capacissima di sentirsi offesa e spinta, come bambina e come donna, a raggiungere un successo dopo l'altro, un ammiratore dopo l'altro, una conquista dopo l'altra, tanto dall'incertezza quanto da un eccesso di fiducia in se stessa. Una ragazza sveglia, per la sua età, anche troppo, ma sotto quasi tutti gli altri aspetti emotivamente squilibrata e decisamente immatura.”

InsightPsicologiaDonneAnalisi
Book:The Human Stain
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“Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Samsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! "You better tell me you're sorry, you, or else! And I don't mean maybe either!" I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not-meaning-maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.”

Gregor Samsa
Book:Portnoy’s Complaint
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“...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 LifeHow To Make CredibleTo Fortify And Defend Myself
Book:Operation Shylock: A Confession
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“Il s'avança un fauteuil, s'installa entre sa femme et sa mère et, tandis que Dawn parlait, il lui prit la main. Il y a cent façons de prendre la main de quelqu'un. Selon que c'est la main d'un enfant, la main d'un ami, la main d'un parent agé, la main de celui qui part, la main du mourant, la main du mort. Il tenait la main de Dawn comme on tient la main d'une femme adorée, toute sa ferveur passant dans son étreinte, comme si, par cette pression de sa paume, il arrivait à échanger leurs âmes, comme si ces doigts enlacés symbolisaient toute leur intimité. Il tenait la main de Dawn comme s'il ne savait rien de leur situation présente.”

FrenchMain
Book:American Pastoral
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“Pensé que la insatisfacción humana había encontrado en Murray Ringold a su digno rival. Había sobrevivido a la insatisfacción. Eso es lo que queda cuando todo ha pasado, la tristeza disciplinada del estoicismo. Esto es el enfriamiento. Durante tanto tiempo es tal el calor, todo en la vida es tan intenso...y entonces, gradualmente, el calor se reduce, llega el enfriamiento y luego las cenizas. El hombre que me enseñó a boxear con un libro ha vuelto para demostrarme cómo puedes boxear con la vejez. Y es ésa una habilidad asombrosa y noble, pues nada te enseña menos sobre la vejez que haber llevado una vida vigorosa.”

TristezaPasadoVejezEstoicismoInsatisfacciónFrialdad
Book:I Married a Communist
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