The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!” (Portnoy’s Complaint Quotes)
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“American society not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property–on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it’s beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“Why is the smallest thing I do for pleasure immediately illicit—while the rest of the world rolls laughing in the mud! Pig? She ought to see the charges and complaints that are filed in my office in a single morning: what people do to one another, out of greed and hatred! For dough! For power! For spite! For nothing!”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
“You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”
Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint
