Patrimony Quotes

“We're the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn't with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony

“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, Patrimony: A True Story

“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, Patrimony

“But this had happened to me more than once in my life: I had refused to allow convention to determine my conduct, only to learn, after I’d gone my own way, that my bedrock feelings were sometimes more conventional than my sense of unswerving moral imperative.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony

“There was a new ordeal to face, and facing ordeals did not allow for hopelessness. It called forth instead that amalgam of defiance and resignation with which he had learned to confront the humiliations of old age.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony

“..his mind, in it's habitual way, working to detach him from the agonizing isolation of a man at the edge of oblivion and to connect his brain tumor to a larger history, to place his suffering in a context where he was no longer someone alone with an affliction peculiarly and horribly his own but a member of a clan whose trials he knew and accepted and had no choice but to share.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony