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Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories QUOTES

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories QUOTES

1 " None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

2 " How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble? "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

3 " ... a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

4 " Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

5 " Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

6 " Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

7 " I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, the underside of love. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

8 " ...Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education? "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

9 " Actually, we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

10 " It's a hard thing to be a jew... it's a harder thing to stay one. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

11 " The drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached. "

― Philip Roth , Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories