509 Quotes by Philip Roth

You don’t have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged – where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.

Nothing that befalls anyone is too senseless to have happened.

The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.

Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone.

The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers.

How easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard.