Nemesis Philip Roth Quotes

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you’re to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear—that’s your job and mine.

As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark—or Europe or the Pacific—in the summer of 1944.

Epidemics have a way of spontaneously running out of steam.

What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.

even when it felt like a hollow performance.

Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself.

That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever.

Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.

His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond--in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making.

His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one God-head, as in Christianity, but of two-a sick fuck and an evil genius.

It’s important that neighborhood life goes on as usual—otherwise, it’s not only the stricken and their families who are victims, but Weequahic itself becomes a victim. At

He did this despite its causing him to feel keenly not the presence he was seeking but rather the absence of one he’d never seen anywhere other than in photos,

—death revealed itself to him no less powerfully than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke’d head.

Play for the adult is recreation, the renewal of life; play for the child is growth, the gaining of life.” Tacked

But what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with.

I learned that back there in Weequahic in 1944 I'd lived through a summerlong social tragedy that didn't have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too.

Talking to Marcia about their engagement, he was almost able to look the other way and rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times.

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.

You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accomodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense of life?

Talking like this seemed to him to be neither pleasant nor unpleasant -- it was a pouring forth that before long he could not control, neither an unburdening nor a remedy so much as an exile's painful visit to the irreclaimable homeland, the beloved birthplace that was the site of his undoing.

A culpa em alguém como Bucky pode parecer absurda, porém é, de fato, inevitável. Uma pessoa como ele está condenada. Jamais irá corresponder ao ideal que carrega dentro de si. Nunca sabe onde termina sua responsabilidade. Jamais aceita seus limites porque, sobrecarregado com uma severa bondade natural que não lhe permite resignar-se ao sofrimento dos outros, nunca admitirá , sem se sentir culpado, que possa estar sujeito a alguma limitação

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese? Why does He place one Weequahic child in polio-ridden Newark for the summer and another in the splendid sanctuary of the Poconos? For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.

We don't know what kills polio germs," Dr. Steinberg said. "We don't know who or what carries polio, and there's still some debate about how it enters the body. But what's important is that you cleaned up an unhygienic mess and reassured the boys by the way you took charge. ... You must understand that a lot of us who are much older and more experienced with illness than you are also shaken by it. To stand by as a doctor unable to stop the spread of this dreadful disease is painful for all of us. A crippling disease that attacks mainly children and leaves some of them dead -- that's difficult for any adult to accept. You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you're to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility." He thought to ask: Doesn't God have a conscience? ... But instead he asked, "Should the playground be shut down?" "You're the director. Should it?" Dr. Steinberg asked.

They sat on fold-up beach chairs and were talking about polio. The older ones, like his grandmother, had lived through the city's 1916 epidemic and were lamenting the fact that in the intervening years science had been unable to find a cure for the disease or come up with an idea of how to prevent it. Look at Weequahic, they said, as clean and sanitary as any section in the city, and it's the worst hit. There was talk, somebody said, of keeping the colored cleaning women from coming to the neighborhood for fear that they carried the polio germs up from the slums. Somebody else said that in his estimation the disease was spread by money, by paper money passing from hand to hand. The important thing, he said, was always to wash your hands after you handled paper money or coins. What about the mail, someone else said, you don't think it could be spread by the mail? What are you going to do, somebody retorted, suspend delivering the mail? The whole city would come to a halt.