Portnoy’s Complaint Quotes
"She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise."
"One consequence of this fantasy, which survived (in this particular form) into the first grade, was that seeing as I had no choice, I became honest."
"And how did my father take all this? He drank—of course, not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia."
"Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers."
"I think I even feared that I might have to be done away with were I to catch sight of her flying in from school through the bedroom window."
"To make life harder, he loved me himself."
"Don’t be dumb like your father, don’t marry beautiful, don’t marry love—marry rich."
"She could bake a cake that tasted like a banana."
"She lights candles for the dead—others invariably forget, she religiously remembers."
"I am so awful she will not have me in her house a minute longer."
"I remember one Sunday morning pitching a baseball at my father, and then waiting in vain to see it go flying off, high above my head."
"I don’t love you any more, not a little boy who behaves like you do."
"My wang was all I really had that I could call my own."
"I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere!"
"I don’t understand what you have to lock the door about. That to me is beyond comprehension."
"I want to see what you’ve done in there. I don’t like the sound of this at all."
"I think maybe what you are going to do, Mr. Joe Di Maggio, is put that glove away and lie down."
"I don’t want you drinking from the drinking fountain in that playground."
"God only knows who touched it before you did."
"My father, in his retirement now, has really only one subject into which he can sink his teeth, the New Jersey Turnpike."
"If a girl had Heshele’s dark lashes, believe me, she’d be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract."
"At least he didn’t leave you with a shikse wife. At least he didn’t leave you with goyische children."
"I don’t have a religion," I say, and obligingly turn in his direction, about a fraction of a degree.
"You can wear rags for all I care, you can dress like a peddler, you can shame and embarrass me all you want, curse me, Alexander, defy me, hit me, hate me—"
"Why, why are they screaming still, ‘Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!’ and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat?"
"Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have?"
"I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke!"
"I couldn’t be more thrilled if I were Wordsworth’s kid!"
"I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame."
"I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, ‘Momma, do we believe in winter?’"
"It’s Rosh Hashanah, Alex, and to me you’re wearing overalls! Get in there and put a tie on and a jacket on and a pair of trousers and a clean shirt, and come out looking like a human being."
"They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made!"
"Hear O Israel, and shine down thy countenance, and the Lord is One, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will—only let it be benign!"
"I can’t live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown."
"The most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman?"
"A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!"
"The way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his little napkin in his lap like that!"
"I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month."
"When duty, discipline, and obedience give way—ah, here, here is the message I take in each Passover with my mother’s matzoh brei—what follows, there is no predicting."
"I have graduated first from every class I’ve ever been in! At twenty-five I was already special counsel to a House Subcommittee—of the United States Congress, Mother! Of America!"
"I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me."
"Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space."
"When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground! When the prick stands up, the brains are as good as dead!"
"My bladder may be distended to watermelon proportions, but interrupted by another presence before the stream has begun... I simply cannot draw my water."
"This is what I have been imagining for myself..."
"Promise, Plum, that you'll never ride in a convertible."
"Ah, but that’s the point, how long is that likely to be?"
"You see, my background was in every way that was crucial to The Monkey the very opposite of what she had had to endure."
"I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men!"
"I imagine vocal cords inside them thick as clotheslines! lungs the size of zeppelins!"
"The faces are the faces you see on Chancellor Avenue! The faces of my neighbors, my uncles, my teachers, the parents of my boyhood friends."
"This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that’s all! Hey, here we're the WASPs!"
"I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers—are Jews."
"Why leave, why go, when there is everything here that I will ever want?"
"I could cry. Look at him sitting there, so oysgemitchet. How he labored for the downtrodden—as will I!"
"Because I’m sure of it: I have contracted something from that Lina! It is just a matter of waiting for the chancre to appear."
"My dream begins as soon as I disembark."
"Hardly defies interpretation, wouldn’t you say?"
"With me it all happens in broad daylight!"
"The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread!"
"Isn't this something? A Jewish country!"
"Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead."
"Who else do you know whose mother actually threatened him with the dreaded knife?"
"Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me, everything happens."
"I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi?"
"This is what it’s like in the Diaspora, you saintly kiddies, this is what it’s like in the exile!"
"You are the most unhappy person I have ever known. You are like a baby."
"I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life."
"Self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor."
"Look at you—how patriotic! You really like victory, don’t you, honey?"
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!"
"So _said the doctor_. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?"