509 Quotes by Philip Roth

Why doesn’t she call the cops and get me shipped off to children’s prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? “Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother.” You’d think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface.

You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.

Son, anything can happen to anyone,” my father told me, “but it usually doesn’t.

The ending is immense. Tell it plainly”.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy – that is every man’s tragedy.

And who’s next, Mr. and Mrs. America, now that the Bill of Rights is no longer the law of the land and the racial haters are running the show.

Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.