Quotes from Everyman

“It's best to give while your hand is still warm.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“He was no more, freed from
being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth - the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“My God, he thought, the man I once was!

The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“حينما تكون شاباً، فإن الجسد الخارجي هو ما يهم، كيف تبدو خارجياً، وحينما تكبر يتركز الاهتمام على ما هو بالداخل، ويتوقف الناس عن الاهتمام بالكيفية التي تبدو عليها.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“For hours after the three consecutive calls—and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink—what he wanted to do was not only to phone and speak to his daughter, whom he found in the hospital with Phoebe, but to revive his own esprit by phoning and talking to his mother and father. Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse... there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones,
and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity
might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his
future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a
half, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all that
mattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environment
of decay. Once he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn't
not talk to them, couldn't but listen to them when they spoke. Between him
and those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than now
transpired between him and those still clad in their flesh.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“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. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond," he told his sons, "no matter how small.
The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And
when she does, this guy is not just a plumber — he's a man with a wife with
a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond
the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable.
A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on
her hand!”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“je kunt alles doorstaan zei Phoebe, zelfs als het vertrouwen geschonden is, als het maar eerlijk wordt bekend. je wordt dan levenspartners op een andere manier, maar je kunt nog wel partners blijven. maar liegen- liegen is een goedkope manier van macht uitoefenen over de ander. wie liegt, kijkt toe terwijl de ander handelt op basis van onvolledige informatie- met andere woorden zichzelf vernedert. ... het is toch eeuwig hetzelfde verhaal. de man verliest de hartstocht voor de huwelikspartner, zonder dat kan hij niet leven. de vrouw is pragmatisch. de vrouw is realistisch. zeker de hartstocht is geluwd, maar zij is tevreden met de lichamelijke genegenheid, gewoon samen met hem in bed liggen, hij in haar armen, zij in de zijne. maar voor hem is dat niet genoeg. hij is een man die niet zonder leven kan”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“hoe weemoedig hij soms ook mocht kijken naar zulke echtparen in de vallende schemering of op zondagmiddagen, de week had nog meer uren en hun leven was niets voor hem, als hij zijn melancholie weer de baas was”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“This ordinarily even-tempered man struck furiously at his heart like
some fanatic at prayer, and, assailed by remorse not just for this mistake but for all his
mistakes, all the ineradicable, stupid, inescapable mistakes — swept away by the misery
of his limitations yet acting as if life's every incomprehensible contingency were of his
making”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Old age isn't a battle, old age is a massacre.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness — the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Das Alter ist kein Kampf; es ist ein Massaker.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“فتاة نقية وحساسة،لا يعيبها سوى كرمها وعطائها الزائد،بدون أن تسبب أذى،تخفي التعاسة بأن تشطب على أخطاء كل شخص عزيز عليها،عن طريق المزيد من الحب. أكوام من التسامح كما لو كانت اكواما كثيرة من القش.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“- نحن لم ننم. كانت تبكي طوال الليل.

- طوال الليالي الأربع؟ هذا بكاء كثير على دانماركية عمرها أربعة وعشرون عاما. لا أعتقد أنه حتى هاملت قد بكى هذا القدر من البكاء.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“لا شيء يعيد صنع الواقع، فقط خذي الأمر على ما هو عليه، تمسكي بواقعك واقبليه مثلما يأتي، لا يوجد سبيل آخر...”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“...Çünkü herkes gibi onun da başına gelecek. Çünkü hayatın en rahatsız edici gücü, ölümdür. Çünkü ölüm çok adaletsizdir. Çünkü insan bir defa yaşamın tadına varınca ölüm dahi gözükmez ona...”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“He was walking back through the cemetery to his car when he came upon a black man digging a grave with a shovel. The man was standing about two feet down in the unfinished grave and stopped shoveling and hurling the dirt out to the side as the visitor approached him. He wore dark coveralls and an old baseball cap, and from the gray in his mustache and the lines in his face he looked to be at least fifty. His frame, however, was still thick and strong.
"I thought they did this with a machine," he said to the gravedigger.
"In big cemeteries, where they do many graves, a lot of times they use a machine, that's right." He spoke like a Southerner, but very matter-of-factly, very precisely, more like a pedantic schoolteacher than a physical laborer. "I don't use a machine," the gravedigger continued, "because it can sink the other graves. THe soil can give and it can crush in on the box. And you have the gravestones you have to deal with. It's just easier in my case to do everything by hand. Much neater. Easier to take the dirt away without ruining anything else. I use a real small tractor that I can maneuver easily, and I dig by hand.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“فزوجته تمتلك شيئا لا يفنى. لأنه فيما وراء الجمال والمكانة والقيمة، الألماسة لا تفنى. قطعة من التراب غير قابلة للفناء، وتضعها في يدها مجرد امرأة هالكة!”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“La vejez no es una batalla; la vejez es una masacre.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

“Puoi superare qualunque cosa, anche se la fiducia è stata tradita, se ti viene confessato. Allora diventate compagni di vita in un modo diverso, ma è sempre possibile rimanere compagni. Ma mentire... Mentire significa esercitare un meschino, spregevole controllo sull'altra persona. Significa permettere che l'altra persona agisca in base a informazioni incomplete. Lasciare, in altri termini, che si umili.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman

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Popular quotes

“I’m going?” Malcolm asked nervously.
“Yep.”
“But I don’t know anything about hunting bears.”
“We aren’t hunting a bear,” Raithe said. “You just heard her.”
“Then why am I terrified?”
“Because it will be dark by the time we get out there, because I’m going, and because the gods are infatuated with me this month.”
“Tell me again why I’m going.”
Raithe ran toward the gate. “It’s your reward for hitting people with rocks.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from Age of Myth

“I had been so used to God's voice in the fire and stars that I had forgotten to listen for it in the counsels of men.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep

“My Death If I’m lucky, I’ll be wired every whichway in a hospital bed. Tubes running into my nose. But try not to be scared of me, friends! I’m telling you right now that this is okay. It’s little enough to ask for at the end. Someone, I hope, will have phoned everyone to say, “Come quick, he’s failing!” And they will come. And there will be time for me to bid goodbye to each of my loved ones. If I’m lucky, they’ll step forward and I’ll be able to see them one last time and take that memory with me. Sure, they might lay eyes on me and want to run away and howl. But instead, since they love me, they’ll lift my hand and say “Courage” or “It’s going to be all right.” And they’re right. It is all right. It’s just fine. If you only knew how happy you’ve made me! I just hope my luck holds, and I can make some sign of recognition. Open and close my eyes as if to say, “Yes, I hear you. I understand you.” I may even manage something like this: “I love you too. Be happy.” I hope so! But I don’t want to ask for too much. If I’m unlucky, as I deserve, well, I’ll just drop over, like that, without any chance for farewell, or to press anyone’s hand. Or say how much I cared for you and enjoyed your company all these years. In any case, try not to mourn for me too much. I want you to know I was happy when I was here. And remember I told you this a while ago—April 1984. But be glad for me if I can die in the presence of friends and family. If this happens, believe me, I came out ahead. I didn’t lose this one.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.