Top 250 Philip Roth Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it’s based on the truth about people’s selfishness, and theirs doesn’t because it’s based on a fairy tale about people’s brotherhood. It’s such a crazy fairy tale they’ve got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it.”

— Philip Roth

202. “Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say ‘set free.’ A Jew set free from Jews – yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.”

— Philip Roth

203. “The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.”

— Philip Roth

204. “That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.”

— Philip Roth

205. “There is no life without patience.”

— Philip Roth

206. “The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair.”

— Philip Roth

207. “He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.”

— Philip Roth

208. “They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.”

— Philip Roth

209. “Nothing keeps its promise.”

— Philip Roth

210. “It’s no picnic up there in the egosphere.”

— Philip Roth

211. “Even when she was dressed up she didn’t look like a chosen person.”

— Philip Roth

212. “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live.”

— Philip Roth

213. “America?” said Gamesh, smiling. “Roland, what’s American to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the the stands? It’s just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people.”

— Philip Roth

214. “There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.”

— Philip Roth

215. “How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” Though.”

— Philip Roth

216. “Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.”

— Philip Roth

217. “Which only goes to show what everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.”

— Philip Roth

218. “He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?”

— Philip Roth

219. “And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint’s, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.”

— Philip Roth

220. “Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy.”

— Philip Roth

221. “Hypergamy. Do you know what it is?” “Never heard of it.” “Bedding women of a superior social class. Desire based on a superior social class.”

— Philip Roth

222. “Though I’d never forgotten Alan, I hadn’t uttered his name aloud in the many years since he’d died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.”

— Philip Roth

223. “Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.”

— Philip Roth

224. “I don’t know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that’s it.”

— Philip Roth

225. “The ending is immense. Tell it plainly”.”

— Philip Roth

226. “If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach ‘Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,’ a course that would be over before it began.”

— Philip Roth

227. “There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness – not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.”

— Philip Roth

228. “Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.”

— Philip Roth

229. “This man did not deal in fairy tales. You could see that as soon as you walked into his office. Schevitz was somebody who liked to be proved right, somebody whose wish to prevail was his vocation.”

— Philip Roth

230. “I have found in my life that I often phone one person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.”

— Philip Roth

231. “As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark – or Europe or the Pacific – in the summer of 1944.”

— Philip Roth

232. “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory – to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.”

— Philip Roth

233. “I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.”

— Philip Roth

234. “Why doesn’t she call the cops and get me shipped off to children’s prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? “Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother.” You’d think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.”

— Philip Roth

235. “Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.”

— Philip Roth

236. “Ma appena desideri appassionatamente una cosa sulla quale non puoi esercitare alcun controllo, sei alla vigilia di una grossa delusione: ti stai preparando a farti mettere in ginocchio.”

— Philip Roth

237. “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

238. “Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes? Nothing passes. The same emotions are here!”

— Philip Roth

239. “The accident of a wrong turn had brought me there, and all I did by getting out of the car and entering the cemetery to find her grave was to bow to its impelling force. My mother and the other dead had been brought here by the impelling force of what was, after all, a more unlikely accident–having once lived.”

— Philip Roth

240. “It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath’s sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.”

— Philip Roth

241. “I think a lot of those women who seem bright also seem very ferocious. What you like is that I seem bright without being ferocious, somebody who is really rather ordinary and is not determined to kick you in the teeth. But why carry it further – why marry me and have a child and settle down like everyone else to an impostor’s life?” ”Because I’ve decided to give up the artificial fiction of being myself for the genuine, satisfying falseness of somebody else. Marry me.”

— Philip Roth

242. “Maybe, despite ideology, politics, and history, a genuine catastrophe is always personal bathos at the core. Life can’t be impugned for any failure to trivialize people. You have to take your hat off to life for the techniques at its disposal to strip a man of his significance and empty him totally of his pride.”

— Philip Roth

243. “He has outlived dissatisfaction. This is what remains after the passing of everything, the disciplined sadness of stoicism. This is the cooling. For so long it’s so hot, everything in life is so intense, and then little by little it goes away, and then comes the cooling, and then comes the ashes.”

— Philip Roth

244. “But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay, enough to kill all and everyone.”

— Philip Roth

245. “Waarom zou ik behoefte hebben aan een monument in mijn naam terwijl er op straat zo’n feestbanket rondloopt?”

— Philip Roth

246. “That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever.”

— Philip Roth

247. “The profusion of the stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die.”

— Philip Roth

248. “Epidemics have a way of spontaneously running out of steam.”

— Philip Roth

249. “All of this was why, from Quahsay, I had mailed my four published stories to Lonoff. Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son.”

— Philip Roth

250. “Suppose all I have fallen in love with is that voice deliciously phrasing its English sentences? The man who died for the soothing sound of a highly calibrated relative clause.”

— Philip Roth