Quotes from The Human Stain

“The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“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.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“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.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“(...) he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“É muito difícil ler os clássicos; logo a culpa é dos clássicos. Hoje o estudante faz valer a sua incapacidade como um privilégio. Eu não consigo aprender isto, portanto alguma coisa está errada nisto. E há especialmente alguma coisa errada com o mau professor que quer ensinar tal matéria. Deixou de haver critérios - para só haver opiniões.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“What do you do with the kid who can't read? ...Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them--so Coleman believed more often than not.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.” —p. 342”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“In the ass is how you create loyalty.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“...devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“...What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else's idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants defining him, which may indeed be what to him seem most unreal--in short, every perplexity pumping the human imagination seemed to lie somewhat outside her own unswerving allegiance to a canon of time-honored rules.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“Tenía una imponente cabellera, una laberíntica y ondeante guirnalda de espirales y bucles, ensortijados y lo bastante grandes para servir como adornos navideños. El desasosiego de su infancia parecía haber pasado a las enroscaduras de su sinuosa y espesa cabellera. Su cabellera irreversible. Podías fregar cazos con aquel cabello sin que se alterase más que si lo hubieran cosechado en las oscuras profundidades marinas, como si fuese un organismo que creciera en los arrecifes, un denso ónice vivo, híbrido de coral y arbusto, tal vez poseedor de propiedades medicinales.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction, and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

“the phallic dignity, of a powerhouse of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins,”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

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“He didn’t call on Monday.

“Pay up,” she said.

“He’ll call,” Mike said. “He took a pinky pledge.”

Mike made a good point, but how long could even a sacred vow sealed by the tiniest and most loyal of digits forestall the inevitable?

They decided to give it a month. Tuesday morning the phone rang.

“Hello,” said an increasingly familiar British voice.

“Oh, hello,” Becky said, and thought both “darn” and “hooray!” at the same time. She hated to lose a bet.

“Yes, hello,” said Felix.

Becky cleared her throat. “Did you go skiing?”

“Yes, you know, we did.”

“Have a good time?”

“Mm hmm.”

“Good. Sounds . . . fun.”

“So, what do we do now, swap stories about our exes? Watch a reality show on the telly and narrate to each other in scandalized voices? ‘Can you believe she said that? I can’t believe she just said that.’ ”

“You don’t have many friends, do you?”

“I have thousands of fans, dozens of itinerant co-workers, a handful of acolytes, three stalkers, and a wife.”

“You have no idea how this friend business works, do you?” she asked.

“Ha!” Felix said.

“Ooh, that was a nice ‘ha.’ Full of derisive laughter and effectively evading any answer.”

“Thank you. I’ve been practicing.”

“Yeah. So, um, you have no idea how this works, do you?”

“I know there’s talking involved, don’t I? And phone calling. I’m not such an amateur as all that.”

“Felix, are you really sure you want to be friends?”

“What do you mean, am I sure? I took a pinky pledge.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from The Actor and the Housewife

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