Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so … - Philip Roth

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Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else...What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?" Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence — precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

Philip Roth

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About Philip Roth

<noinclude></noinclude> Philip Milton Roth (19 March 1933 – 22 May 2018) was an American novelist. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his novel American Pastoral. In May 2011, he received the Man Booker International Prize, for achievement in fiction on the world stage, becoming the fourth winner of the biennial award.

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Birth Name: Philip Milton Roth

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Probably I couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.

The concerns of fiction, let it be said, are not those of a statistician — or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, "What do people think?"; the PR man asks, "What will people think?"

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles — and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech — look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else...What large thought Sabbath was strug… - Philip Roth

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