81
" Nunca vou conhecer meus netos", disse ela.
Coleman estava preparado. O importante era não pensar no cabelo de Iris e deixar que sua mãe falasse, deixá-la encontrar sua fluência e, com base no fluxo suave de suas próprias palavras, criar para ele uma desculpa.
"Você nunca vai deixar que eles me vejam", prosseguiu sua mãe. "Nunca vai deixar eles saberem quem eu sou. 'Mamãe', você vai me dizer, 'vá à estação rodoviária de Nova York, fique sentada na sala de espera, que às onze e vinte e cinco eu passo com os meus filhos, todos eles endomingados. 'Fique sentadinha, mamãe, não diga nada, que eu passo com eles bem devagar'. E você sabe muito bem que eu vou estar lá. A estação rodoviária. O jardim zoológico. O Central Park. O que você disser, é claro que eu vou fazer. Você me diz que a única maneira de eu pegar os meus netos é você me contratar pra tomar conta deles, dizendo que meu nome é sra. Brown, e eu aceito. É claro que eu faço o que você mandar. Eu não tenho opção. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
82
" As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
83
" Na Nova Inglaterra, o verão de 1998 foi marcado por muito sol e calor; no beisebol, por uma batalha entre um deus branco e outro deus negro; e, nos Estados Unidos, por uma imensa febre de religiosidade, de puritanismo, quando o terrorismo — que se seguiu ao comunismo como a principal ameaça à segurança do país — foi sucedido pela felação, quando um presidente viril, de meia-idade mas de aparência jovem, e uma estagiária ousada e apaixonada, com vinte e um anos de idade, aprontaram no Salão Oval como se fossem dois adolescentes num estacionamento, resgatando a mais antiga paixão americana, historicamente talvez o seu prazer mais traiçoeiro e subversivo: o êxtase da santimônia. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
85
" 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. Without the sing it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
91
" Sempre que um branco lida com você", seu pai dizia à família, "por mais bem-intencionado que seja, ele sempre pressupõe que você é intelectualmente inferior. De um modo ou de outro, se não diretamente com palavras então com a expressão do rosto, o tom de voz, a impaciência, ou até mesmo o contrário — a tolerância, uma maravilhosa demonstração de *humanidade* —, ele vai sempre falar com você como se você fosse burro, e, se você não for, ele vai ficar espantado. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
93
" Early on, he tried to get the government help and all they gave him was some sleeping pills, so fuck the government [..] There are these things going over his head. Still he tries: eventually gets the wife, the home, the kids, the farm. He wants to be alone, but she wants to settle down and farmi with him, so he tries to want to settle down too. Stuff he remembers easygoing Les wanting ten, fifteen years back, before Vietnam, he tries to want again. The trouble is, he can't really feel for these folks. He's sitting in the kitchen and he's eating with them and there's nothing. No way he can go from that to this. Yet still he tries. A couple times in the middle of the night he wakes up chocking her, but it isn't his fault - it's the government fault. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
95
" Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security—was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
96
" Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this
thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the
minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius
Caesar out of his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays
—the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when
Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel
—the son felt his father's majesty as never before: the grandeur
of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman
away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange
home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was.
"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
The word "valiant," as the preacher intoned it, stripped away Coleman's
manly effort at sober, stoical self-control and laid bare a
child's longing for that man closest to him that he'd never see again,
the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so
sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently
taught Coleman to want to be stupendous. Coleman wept with the
most fundamental and copious of all emotions, reduced helplessly
to everything he could not bear. As an adolescent complaining
about his father to his friends, he would characterize him with far
more scorn than he felt or had the capacity to feel—pretending to
an impersonal way of judging his own father was one more method
he'd devised to invent and claim impregnability. But to be no longer
circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all
the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and
that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the
day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or
not, his father who had been making up Coleman's story for him;
now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
99
" By the time she was their age, she’d seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars. "
― Philip Roth , The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
