“He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
“I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition.”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
“As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
“I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that?”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
“Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
Philip Roth
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
Born date March 19, 1933
See more on GoodReads
“Involuntarily, she stopped, jerked up her head, looked around her like a frightened woman. They weren’t car horns: they were wind instruments”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Mirror of Her Dreams
“إن حق انتقاد الآخرين حق يُكتسب ويُستحق. إذا أبدينا لأحدهم عداوة واحتقاراً فإن أقل ملاحظة نصوغها، سواء كانت مسوَّغة أم لا، ستبدو تهجماً يدفعه إلى التصلب والانغلاق على نفسه مما يجعل عملية التغيّر صعبة. وبالعكس ، إذا أبدينا لأحدهم الصداقة والود والاحترام، ليس بالمظاهر فقط وإنما بموقف صادق يشعره على هذا النحو، يمكن عندئذ أن نسمح لأنفسنا بأن ننتقد ما نقدّر أنه يستحق الانتقاد مع إمكانية أن يُصغي لنا .”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
“Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love
“I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales
“I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth.”
― Karen Maitland, quote from Company of Liars
Crown of Crystal Fla...
Close to Famous
The Hollow Chocolate...
Archangel's Blade
The Happy Prince and...
Echoes of Scotland S...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.
