Mark

“It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“fingerprint—it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Destiny had become perfectly understandable while everything unenigmatic, such as standing for the photograph in the third row back, with my one arm on the shoulder of Marshall Goldstein (“Children 39, 37. Grandchildren 8, 6”) and my other on the shoulder of Stanley Wernikoff (“Children 39, 38. Grandchildren 5, 2, 8 mo.”), had become inexplicable.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“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. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral