Philip Roth - The Human Stain (2000)

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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
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

Philip Roth
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
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
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
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
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Philip Roth
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...

Philip Roth
How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.

Philip Roth
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