love

I'm against it because it is falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love'. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. She was a foreign body introduced into your wholeness. And for a year and a half you struggled to incorporate it. But you'll never be whole until you expel it. You either get rid of it or you incorporate it through self-distortion. And that's what you did and what drove you mad.

in The Dying Animal
Philip Roth

afinal era o sexo

que tornou Philip Roth tão lido (o melhor escritor americano da actualidade, dizem)

. . .
I feel anxious unless I speak to her on the phone every day, and then I feel anxious after we've spoken. Women who in the past demanded regular calls, telephoning back and forth like that, I'd invariably gotten rid of - and now it was I demanding it of her: the daily fix by phone. Why do I flatter her when we speak? Why don't I stop telling her how perfect she is? Why do I always feel like I'm saying the wrong thing to this girl? I'm unable to make out what she makes of me, what she makes of anything, and my confusion causes me to say things that sound false or exaggerated to my ear, so I hang up full of silent resentment toward her. But when the rare day passes that I'm able to discipline myself enough not to speak to her, not to call her, not to flatter her, not to sound false, not to resent what she unknowingly does to me, it's worse. I can't stop doing anything I'm doing, and everything I'm doing leaves me upset. I don't feel the authority with her that's necessary for my stability, and yet she comes to me because of that authority.

in The Dying Animal
Philip Roth