The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“And as he spoke, I was thinking, ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.” (The Counterlife Quotes)
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“If you’re from New Jersey,” Nathan had said, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it’s highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they’ll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you’re gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, ‘Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman—I have to make a pee.’ For a New Jersey novelist that’s as much immortality as it’s realistic to hope for.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn’t begin to know what they added up to.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark’s old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth. Back when”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“No, I won’t do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“People are unjust to anger — it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“There was no other explanation for such an illness in a man otherwise so young and fit. It was the consequence of failing to find the ruthlessness to take what he wanted instead of capitulating to what he should do.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“Things don’t have to reach a peak. They can just go on. You do want to make a narrative out of it, with progress and momentum and dramatic peaks and then a resolution. You seem to see life as having a beginning, a middle, an ending, all of them linked together with something bearing your name. But it isn’t necessary to give things a shape. You can yield to them too. No goals–just letting things take their own course. You must begin to see it as it is: there are insoluble problems in life, and this is one.”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
“Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?”
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
