The Human Stain 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

“Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”
― 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

“Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
― 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

“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

“Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”
― 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

“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

“Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“(...) he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“But 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. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“É muito difícil ler os clássicos; logo a culpa é dos clássicos. Hoje o estudante faz valer a sua incapacidade como um privilégio. Eu não consigo aprender isto, portanto alguma coisa está errada nisto. E há especialmente alguma coisa errada com o mau professor que quer ensinar tal matéria. Deixou de haver critérios - para só haver opiniões.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn’t deprive me of the silence — the music is the silence coming true.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“In the ass is how you create loyalty.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“What do you do with the kid who can't read? ...Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them--so Coleman believed more often than not.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

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

“There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“...What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else's idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants defining him, which may indeed be what to him seem most unreal--in short, every perplexity pumping the human imagination seemed to lie somewhat outside her own unswerving allegiance to a canon of time-honored rules.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.” —p. 342”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“...devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Un piccolissimo simbolo, se ce ne fosse stato bisogno, del milione di circostanze della vita altrui, di quella bufera di dettagli che formano il guazzabuglio di una biografia umana: un piccolissimo simbolo che mi ricordava perchè la nostra comprensione della gente dev'essere sempre, per forza, nel migliore dei casi, difettosa.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Para viver na confusão do mundo com um mínimo de sofrimento, o segredo é conseguir fazer com que o maior número de pessoas possível embarque nas suas ilusões; para viver sozinho aqui na montanha, longe de todos os envolvimentos, todas as atrações e expectativas que nos perturbam a paz, longe, sobretudo, de nossa própria intensidade, o segredo é organizar o silêncio, pensar na plenitude da montanha como capital, encarar o silêncio como uma riqueza que está se multiplicando constantemente. O silêncio que nos cerca é a vantagem que escolhemos, e é só com ele que temos intimidade. O segredo é encontrar sustento nas (Hawthorne mais uma vez) "comunicações de uma mente solidária consigo mesma". O segredo é encontrar sustento em *pessoas* como Hawthorne, na sabedoria dos mortos geniais.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain