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

“Però recorda una cosa: no pots evitar que el teu pare es mori, i pot ser que no puguis evitar que pateixi. He vist centenars de persones que han hagut de passar per tot això amb els seus pares. T’ho vas estalviar amb la teva mare, i ella també s’ho va estalviar. En el cas del teu pare, sembla que no serà tan fàcil.

...

Llavors li vaig deixar anar quatre paraules, quatre paraules que mai li havia dit en tota la meva vida. «Que em facis cas», vaig dir. «Posa’t un suèter i les vambes.»

I van funcionar, les quatre paraules. Tinc cinquanta-cinc anys, ell gairebé en té vuitanta-set, i som a l’any 1988: «Que em facis cas», li dic... i me’n fa. La fi d’una era, el començament d’una altra.

...

Tot i això, semblava menys enfonsat que durant el període en què no havíem fet res. S’havia d’enfrontar a una nova prova, i enfrontar-se a proves no admet cap mena de desesperança. La situació requeria aquella amalgama de rebel·lia i resignació amb què havia après a afrontar les humiliacions de la vellesa.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony

“Y así sucesivamente, recordando las enfermedades, las operaciones, las fiebres, las transfusiones, los comas, las vigilias, las muertes, los entierros... Su mente, como de costumbre, intentaba arrancarlo del penosísimo aislamiento de un hombre al borde del olvido, poniendo en conexión el tumor cerebral con una historia de mayor alcance, colocando su padecimiento en un contexto donde él ya no era una persona sola con una aflicción horrible y peculiarmente propia, sino el miembro de un clan cuyos males se sabía de memoria y aceptaba y no tenía más remedio que compartir con todos.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimonio: Una historia verdadera

“estaba, sencillamente, haciendo lo que toda su vida había hecho: superar la dificultad siguiente. Media hora antes habíamos enterrado el cuerpo de mi madre; ahora tocaba deshacerse de sus cosas.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimonio: Una historia verdadera

“Si no hay en el cementerio nadie que nos vea”
― Philip Roth, Patrimonio: Una historia verdadera