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Book: The Human Stain
Quotes of Book: The Human Stain
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  1. 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.
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  2. 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.
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  3. Philip Roth _ The Human Stain

    Questo è tutto ciò che Faunia, nel suo tono freddo e distaccato, stava dicendo alla ragazza che nutriva il serpente: noi lasciamo una macchia, lasciamo una traccia, lasciamo la nostra impronta. Impurità, crudeltà, abuso, errore, escremento, seme: non c'è altro mezzo per essere qui. Nulla a che fare con la disobbedienza. Nulla a che fare con la grazia o la salvezza o la redenzione. E' in ognuno di noi. Insita. Inerente. Qualificante. La macchia che esiste prima del suo segno. Che esiste senza il segno. La macchia così intrinseca che non richiede un segno. La macchia che precede la disobbedienza, che comprende la disobbedienza e frustra ogni spiegazione o ogni comprensione. Ecco perché ogni purificazione è uno scherzo. Uno scherzo crudele, se è per questo. La fantasia della purezza è terrificante. E' folle. Cos'è questa brama di purificazione, se non l'aggiunta di nuove impurità? Della macchia Faunia diceva soltanto che era inevitabile. Questo, ovviamente, era il suo punto di vista: siamo creature irrimediabilmente macchiate. Rassegnata all'orribile, elementare imperfezione.
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  4. 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.
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  5. Philip Roth _ The Human Stain

    The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
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  6. 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.
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  7. 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.
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  8. 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...
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  9. 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.
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  10. Philip Roth _ The Human Stain

    All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As
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  11. Philip Roth _ The Human Stain

    In the ass is how you create loyalty.
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  12. 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.
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