Philip Roth Quotations | Page 2

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

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.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.