Philip Roth · 320 pages
Rating: (13.6K votes)
“Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, the underside of love.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble?”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“... a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“old Blotnik had been mumbling so steadily for so many years, Ozzie suspected he had memorized the prayers and forgotten all about God. “It”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“We’ll go to the most posh gynecologist in New York. One who gets Harper’s Bazaar for the reception room. How does that sound?”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“LaHill was a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
“This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, quote from The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
“What we should lament is not the loss of houses or of land, but the loss of men’s lives. Men come first; the rest is the fruit of their labour.”
― Thucydides, quote from History of the Peloponnesian War
“might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.”
― Tad Williams, quote from City of Golden Shadow
“It is the work of unjust men, we think, to carry off women at all; but once they have been carried off, to take seriously the avenging of them is the part of fools, as it is the part of sensible men to pay no heed to the matter: clearly, the women would not have been carried off had they no mind to be.”
― Herodotus, quote from The Histories
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