Portnoy’s Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Release: January 12, 1969
Publisher: Random House
Genre: Literature, Fiction, Psychological
ISBN-13: 978-0394441986
Main Character(s): Alexander Portnoy, Dr. Spielvogel
Synopsis: “Portnoy’s Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.”
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Never Mind the Sex: Portnoy’s Complaint is About Finding Yourself
Quotes and Lines
In that ferocious and self-annihilating way in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannan, but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream.
“A’s in school,” he says, “but in life he’s as ignorant as the day he was born.”
Religion is the opiate of the people!
…my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement.
Isn’t it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that “love” that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreamin about? Please. Let us not bullshit one another about “love” and its duration.
The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel–on the body of every Jewish child!–not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.
…a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
Wouldn’t it be nice just to get up all full of energy when it got light and go to sleep dog-tired when it got dark?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a lot of responsibilities and just go around doing them all day and not even realize they were responsibilities?
The perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy.
The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at!