The Human Stain

Philip Roth's The Human Stain took me a while, and it was a step outside my usual literary interests, hence the lower post frequency. Because of this, I don't feel it's appropriate for me to give a review of the book either way. To be fair: Roth is a good writer, the book had some metafictional moments, and the novel overall is an alright commentary on late 20th-century American moralism.

"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 like nothing else."

"'She's turned sex into a vice again.'"

"'I know that every mistake that a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator.'"

"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 from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plentitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.""I did not more than find a friend, and all the world's malice came rushing in."

"Often they said nothing, because saying nothing intensified their pleasure."

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

"He did love secrets. The secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever your wanted to think with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn't where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional."

"Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

"It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the bring of committing his first great crime."

"They were together in the bed in his room every weekend for over a year, feeding on each other like prisoners in solitary madly downing their daily ration of bread and water."

"What he'd learned in the navy is that all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line abut yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested."

"Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end--every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche."

"Why does someone so beautiful want to hide from the human dimension of her experience behind these words?"

"He'd said to her, 'This is more than sex,' and flatly she replied, 'No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex. All by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else.'"

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

"How many times has anyone in the world ever loved before they fucked? How many times have I loved after I fucked?"

"I stayed. I stupidly stayed. Leaving at night--there is nothing more important for a girl like me. I'm not clear about a lot of things, but this I know: staying the next morning, it means something."

"What the hookers told her, the whores' great wisdom: 'Men don't pay you to sleep with them. They pay you to go home.'"

"Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of them all, which is death."

"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."

"..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. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something."

"As it is a human thing to have a secret, it is also a human thing, sooner or later, to reveal it."

"You'd written the book--the book was your life. Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work. Your book was your life--and your art."