The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

I felt woozy and thought I was going to faint. I’d never before seen anyone faint, other than in a movie, and I’d never before fainted myself. I’d never before looked at my house from a hiding place across the street and wished that it was somebody else’s. I’d never before had twenty dollars in my pocket. I’d never before known anyone who’d seen his father hanging in a closet. I’d never before had to grow up at a pace like this.

If only he had been allowed to go along unrehabilitated, on his own stinking trajectory, but that hadn’t happened, and so this was how the great menace undid us and the abomination of violence entered our house, and I saw how bitterness blinds a man and the defilement it spawns.

the discovery that one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that especially where chaos reigned and everything was at stake, one might be better off to wait and do nothing—except that to do nothing was also to do something . . . in such circumstances to do nothing was to do quite a lot—and