Sabbath's Theater

“Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out.”

  

  

 

“I can’t really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don’t give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.”

 “Everything is acted.”

 

 

 

“Whatever. With me there’s some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don’t have. My life never seems real to me.”

 Philip Roth

American Pastoral

 

 

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.”










“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”

“I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface”








“I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.”








“There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.”







“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.”

Philip Roth