Gohar Khechumyan > Gohar's Quotes

“The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“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.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”
― Philip Roth

“The problem with human attraction is not knowing if it will be returned.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush

“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
― George Carlin

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

“Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.”
― Peter Senge

“All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”
― Philip Roth