mİshi

"The national state with its borders, passports, monetary system, customs, and the army for the protection of customs has become a frightful impediment to the economic and cultural development of humanity. The task of the proletariat is not the defense of the national state but its complete and final liquidation."

"I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids–and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorted glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination–indeed, everything and anything except me."

"He doesn’t want to talk about the novel he is trying to achieve; he wants to leave the country, finish it and come back to live in America, a country he insists he has never really left, only crossed the ocean to look at more intently. He hopes he can capture sharply and suggestively the ‘pacing’ of a certain kind of desperate spiritual life: 'I remember in those Pentecostal churches when I was young, the tension, the drama, the struggle for a handle on life.’"

"[I]t’s no credit to this enormously rich country that there are more oppressive, less decent governments elsewhere. We claim superiority of our institutions. We ought to live up to our own standards, not use misery elsewhere as an endless source of self-gratification and justification. Of course, people tell me all the time in the West that they are trying, they are trying hard. Some have tears in their eyes and let me know how awful they feel about the way our poor live, our blacks, or those in dozens of other countries. People can cry much easier than they can change …"

"Roth’s women are enigmas, forgettable; granted, most ancillary characters pale in comparison to his procession of authorial proxies, the monumental potency of his literary solipsism. But his women are ghosts, fixtures of lust and nothing more — scarcely speaking, sprawling nude across pages like painted courtesans. His Brendas and Olinas and Gladyses exist as adjuncts and objects for the centers of gravity in his books: Zuckerman, Coleman Silk, Swede Levov, Kepesh, “Philip,” “Roth.” In allowing myself to be seduced by the author, to inhabit his viewpoint, I adopted this myopia; to be thrilled by great art, I had to abnegate my own gender. This is, of course, a laughably common experience: to be anyone but a white man and consume the canon, one must thrust one’s own experience willfully back, to see a man in the full and indulgent complexity with which he would never, ever see you. He would not deign to; he did not need to; now, he never will."

"Women were like Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque or Manet’s Olympia: They can show you their breasts, or their bottoms, not their souls; their smiles have secrets; they are still and silent, not animate and hungry and desperate and sad and angry all the time."