Philip Roth Quotes

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What's left for them to take?

The first cut is the deepest.

I'm sick of making bloody history.

Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.

Sometimes history reads like a catalogue of post-traumatic stress.

We are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.

Never mind a world That can't see past brutality Answers are getting the gas Live gestures Have constantly been used As weapons

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.

Some people never see the light Till it shines thru bullet holes.

As the stag which the huntsman has hit flies through bush and brake, over stock and stone, thereby exhausting his strength but not expelling the deadly bullet from his body; so does experience show that they who have troubled consciences run from place to place, but carry with them wherever they go their dangerous wounds.

Maybe your history just repeats and repeats until it batters you enough to snap the seams that hold you together

Blows are what awaken us & help to break the dream. They show us the insufficiency of this world & make us long to escape, to have freedom.

I wanna outrace the speed of pain.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

One day I’m going to find a way to rid you of that beast resting on your arm. (Artemis) (He looked at her over his shoulder.) And one day I’m going to find a way to rid myself of the beast resting on my back. (Acheron)