Philip Roth

“(...) he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is…

— Philip Roth

“Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in…

— Philip Roth

“...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…

— Philip Roth

“Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man…

— Philip Roth

“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.…

— Philip Roth

“Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a…

— Philip Roth

“Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler… He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only…

— Philip Roth

“Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in…

— Philip Roth

“…[T]he whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we…

— Philip Roth

“Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the…

— Philip Roth

“Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached…

— Philip Roth

“...we go through life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except us. And since we don't just forget things because…

— Philip Roth

“These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why?…

— Philip Roth

“Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at…

— Philip Roth

For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child…

— Philip Roth

“I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in…

— Philip Roth

“In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics…

— Philip Roth

“Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an…

— Philip Roth

“The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that…

— Philip Roth

“What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff…

— Philip Roth

“Jesus Christ, who they go around telling everyone was God, was actually a Jew! and this fact, that absolutely kills me when…

— Philip Roth

“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That…

— Philip Roth

“Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame - blaming is still ailing, of course, of course - but nonetheless, what was…

— Philip Roth

“The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is…

— Philip Roth

“This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the…

— Philip Roth

“And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each…

— Philip Roth

“There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the…

— Philip Roth

“She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She…

— Philip Roth