Mark > Mark's Quotes

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Destiny had become perfectly understandable while everything unenigmatic, such as standing for the photograph in the third row back, with my one arm on the shoulder of Marshall Goldstein (“Children 39, 37. Grandchildren 8, 6”) and my other on the shoulder of Stanley Wernikoff (“Children 39, 38. Grandchildren 5, 2, 8 mo.”), had become inexplicable.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“fingerprint—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, American Pastoral

“As a family they still flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself. No wonder he couldn’t shut up.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I know what a plantation is, Mr. Legree—I mean, Mr. Levov. I know what it means to run a plantation. You take good care of your niggers. Of course you do. It’s called paternal capitalism. You own ’em, you sleep with ’em, and when you’re finished with ’em you toss ’em out. Lynch ’em only when necessary.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral