The Essential Human Flaw

Quotes from rom The Human Stain by Philip Roth:

'... that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography - a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.'

'... thereby ensuring that I would do anything I could think of not to bore you, including dropping out of contact, if necessary, so as to avoid the risk of becoming boring.'

'Surprises. Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom. But it's a very narrow, antisocial wisdom. It's savage, too. It's the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That's her wisdom, and that's her dignity, but it's negative wisdom ...'

'... that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh - you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past ...'

'I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience - or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism - to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.'

'... 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.'

'The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially one's own intensity, is to organize the silence ...'

'Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength.'

'Learn, he told himself, before you die, to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.'

'"Did you kill anyone when you were in Vietnam?" Was there anyone he didn't kill when he was in Vietnam?'

'You're battling now in a world where nobody's ruthlessness bothers to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric.'

'Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity ...'

'That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if ... if only such things were understandable.'

'... because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense.'

'Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?'

'... all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested.'

'This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous - the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life's little contribution to every human decision.'

'Did not see at all what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished.'

'Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks - she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.'

'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.'

'... she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being.'

'This wonderful language they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything.'

'Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem'. Hitler lacked self-esteem too.'

'Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms it into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him.'