“Have you ever stayed in a place where you wanted someone who didn’t want you? Well don’t—never do. Get out. Don’t stay in a place where you want someone who doesn’t want you. Get out as quickly as you can and don’t come back. That’s all I can say. That’s all you can do.”
—Martin Amis, Other People
“‘You’re quite manic, Jamie. It’s not funny, you know,’ said Lily, who also lived where Jamie lived.
‘How would you know whether it’s funny?’
‘It doesn’t make me laugh.’
‘But you’re a woman! Women don’t laugh when things are funny. They laugh when they’re feeling well.’”
—Martin Amis, Other People
“Some people have fear but some have confidence instead. Which do you have? You’re not confident, I know that. I know that, because actually no one has confidence. The most confident men and women you know—they haven’t got confidence. No one has. Everyone has fear instead. (Unless they have that third thing, which men call madness.)
“They fear they are a secret which other people will one day discover. They fear they are a joke which other people will one day see, which other people will one day get.”
—Martin Amis, Other People
“In the modern literature to which Michael was devoted, adultery was the sign of authenticity in personal life, and marriage the realm of habit, conformity and compromise. By rights, therefore, it was he, Michael, who ought to have been sitting in the corner of this pub, holding the hand of the pretty pale-faced girl with the nicely shaped breasts, and Dennis, dull, dependable old Dennis, who ought to have been pushing his way through the swing door with a suitcase full of shirts and underwear, a nervous envoy from the world of bourgeois morality. It was he, Michael, who ought to have been defying bourgeois morality, and yet he knew that he never would, he would never have the courage, or the wickedness, or indeed the provocation.”
–David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
“Polly felt a cold dread at her heart. Was it possible that the flame of sex could be kept burning only by the breaking of more taboos? After group sex and orgies, what then? Rubber fetishism? Fladge? Child porn? Snuff movies? ‘Where does it end?’ she said.
‘It ends with old age,’ said Jeremy. ‘Impotence. Death. But I don’t intend to give in until I absolutely have to.’
‘You don’t think there’s anything after death?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘That’s just your Catholic upbringing.’
‘I don’t know what’s more frightening, the idea that there’s life after death or the idea that there isn’t,’ said Polly.”
–David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
“There is, however, no cause for progressives to gloat or for conservatives to sulk. Let copulation thrive, by all means; but man cannot live by orgasms alone, and he certainly cannot die by them, except, very occasionally, in the clinical sense. The good news about sexual satisfaction has little to offer those who are crippled, chronically sick, mad, ugly, impotent – or old, which all of us will be in due course, unless we are dead already. Death, after all, is the overwhelming question to which sex provides no answer, only an occasional brief respite from thinking about it. But enough of this philosophy.”
–David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
“When Robin returned from America, not long after Violet’s appearance at Angela and Dennis’s wedding, they got together again; for Robin found that although Violet was pretty impossible to live with, he missed her when she wasn’t there. Violet, he decided, was an addiction, like smoking: it made you feel terrible most of the time, but you couldn’t do without it.”
–David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
“He reached under the table and squeezed her hand, suffused with a Greeneian gloom, ‘the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense that this is where we really belong,’ as a favourite passage in The Heart of the Matter put it.”
–David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex.”
–Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
“I know all the objections that a pure and moral young man can give to claiming personal sovereignty. I know all the admirable labels to attach to not asserting one’s sovereignty. Well, Kenny’s difficulty is that he must be admirable whatever the cost. He lives in fear of a woman telling him he’s not. ‘Selfish’ is the word that cripples him. You selfish bastard. He’s terrified of that judgment, so that’s the judgment that rules.”
–Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
“I said what I wished some forceful man had said to me when I was on the brink of making my mistake. I said, ‘Living in a country like ours, whose key documents are all about emancipation, all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty, living in a free system that is basically indifferent to how you behave as long as the behavior is lawful, the misery that comes your way is most likely to be self-generated. It would be another matter if you were living in Nazi-occupied Europe or in Communist-dominated Europe or in Mao Zedong’s China. There they manufacture the misery for you; you don’t have to take a single wrong step in order never to want to get up in the morning. But here, free of totalitarianism, a man like you has to provide himself his own misery. You, moreover, are intelligent, articulate, good-looking, well educated—you are made to thrive in a country like this one. Here the only tyrant lying in wait will be convention, which is not to be taken lightly either.’”
–Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
“I’ve bought a lot of music, I have everything, piano literature, and I used to read it, and I used to play it, badly. Some passages maybe not so badly. To see how it worked and so on. It wasn’t good in terms of playing, but I had some pleasure. And pleasure is our subject. How to be serious over a lifetime about one’s modest, private pleasures.”
–Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
“The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything about the other person. In the initial moment you understand everything. You are drawn to each other’s surface initially, but you also intuit the fullest dimension.”
–Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
“And as if the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.”
–Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.”
–Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita