Philip Roth

United States
Born on 19 Mar 1933
Writer

Nobody Knows Anything

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows� How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the clich� and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the clich� that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclich�d way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Philip Roth, in 'The Human Stain'
Search
On Amazon

The Human Stain

Philip Roth

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays