American Pastoral Quotes
"The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered."
"Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community—advanced degrees were."
"Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes."
"And how did this affect him—the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line?"
"The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed."
"Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with him."
"Contrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling."
"But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god."
"It never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede Levov."
"The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily pictorialize the hardness of the Kid's life, back before the game of baseball was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate."
"After years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent."
"You been all right though?" "I'm in good shape," I said.
"I'm still at it," Mendy said happily. "Fifty years later. A Daredevil record."
"The truly important thing, the supreme delight of the afternoon, is simply finding that you haven't yet made it onto the 'In Memoriam' page."
"The struggle of his life was to bury this thing. But could he? How? How could a big, sweet, agreeable putz like my brother be expected to deal with this bomb?"
"Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do."
"History, which had made no drastic impingement on the daily life of the local populace since the Revolutionary War, wended its way back out to these cloistered hills and, improbably, with all its predictable unforeseenness, broke helter-skelter into the orderly household of the Seymour Levovs and left the place in a shambles."
"The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy."
"He had been admitted into a mystery more bewildering even than Merry's stuttering: there was no fluency anywhere. It was all stuttering."
"The Swede as he had always known himself—well-meaning, well-behaved, well-ordered Seymour Levov—evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his place."
"You don't see anything because you don't look at anything."
"This makes no sense," he said. "You are subjugating no one by this. Only yourself."
"Your physical restraint is amazing," she said. "Isn't there anything that can get you off dead center?"
"You're not a woman. This does not make you a woman in any way. This makes you a travesty of a woman."
"Faced with something he could not name, he had done everything wrong."
"In his pajamas, in their kitchen, he sits watching every night for her soot-covered face at the window."
"I'm just moving on. I have to. I have to forget about it. Like nothing happened. But it's very sad."
"And this is just a part of what is meant by 'Five years pass.' A very tiny part."
"They could not be forever in bondage to this fucking thing!"
"He looked at her head buried in bandages and felt he might as well be witnessing the preparation for burial of her corpse."
"How could I thank you enough? I feel it's taken me these full twelve months to recover from the surgery."
"He could never root out the unexpected thing. The unexpected thing would be waiting there unseen, for the rest of his life."
"Understanding all too well why she wanted to sell the old house, he acceded to her wish without even trying to make her understand that the reason she wanted to go—because Merry was still there, in every room, Merry at age one, five, ten—was the reason he wanted to stay, a reason no less important than hers."
"He understood everything, all of it, understood just how awful it was for her, and so what could he do but accede?"
"The reason she first went into cattle, she told him, was to get out of that terrible house."
"You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else."
"Only after she was married and no longer a virgin did she discover the place where it was okay for her to be as beautiful as she was, and that place, to the profit of both husband and wife, was with the Swede, in bed."
"Dawn went to Avon to get away from her beauty, but Dawn couldn't get away from it any more than she could openly flaunt it."
"If there's one brick still on top of the other," cried his father, "the idea gets into their heads that the mortar might be useful, so they'll push them apart and take that."
"That's where the Swede was now far and away the stronger partner, she was now far and away the weaker; he was the fortunate, doubtlessly undeserving recipient of so much—what the hell, to whatever demand she made on him, he acceded."
"It wasn't this house she hated anyway; what she hated were memories she couldn't shake loose from, all of them associated with the house, memories that of course he shared."
"No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us as astonishing to experience as it may be. No, nothing small about you people. Made her into a 'revolutionary' full of great thoughts and high-minded ideals. Sons of bitches."
"Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive."
"You flip out a little and that's it. You do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure."
"At home, there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalor."
"Here are her Rimrockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying."
"Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time—they did not have enough time with her."
"I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtle or gross, whether movable or immovable."
"Fantasy and magic. Always pretending to be somebody else."
"This country is frightening. Of course she was raped."
"You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is."
"You don't have to go around getting angry with your family. You can write letters. You can vote. You can get up on a soapbox and make a speech."
"Join the marines if you want to fight for what you believe in, but remember, 'Traitor' isn't a pleasant thing to be called."
"This family is one hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don't have to rebel against your family because your family is not in disagreement with you."
"Now is better than not now, isn't it? Be realistic."
"Something has to be done about that child. Something is going wrong with that child."
"I refuse to leave her alone. I refuse to lose a granddaughter by leaving her alone."
"We can't make happen what we want to happen just by thinking about it. Try to free yourself from a little of it."
"She is gone. She may never want to see us again."
"This is a child who needs help. This is a child who is in trouble and we are not a family who walks out on a child in trouble."
"I want to own the things that money can't buy."
"Johnny Appleseed, out there everywhere planting apple trees."
"Artistic creation obviously was not achieved in any way or for any of the reasons Swede Levov could understand."
"The unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house—it was unfaithfulness."
"Living completely off what they once were. The man is simply not there half the time."
"The perpetual protest. Time was you could step away from it, you could make a stand against it."
"It's not the same out there anymore, in case you haven't heard."
"The grotesque is supplanting everything commonplace that people love about this country."
"Today, to be what they call 'repressed' is a source of shame to people—as not to be repressed used to be."
"Without transgression there is no knowledge."
"A lifetime's agility as a businessman, as an athlete, as a U.S. Marine, had in no way conditioned him for being a captive confined to a futureless box."
"The Swede's default reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and become tolerant and charitable."
"All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider."
"The authority of beauty is a very irrational thing."
"In love, what does that mean? What is 'in love' going to do for you when you have a child?"
"He had tried all his life never to do the wrong thing, and that was what he had done."
"There are a hundred different ways to hold someone's hand."
"The order is minute... He had thought most of it was order and only a little of it was disorder."
"You think you can protect a family and you cannot protect even yourself."
"Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable."
"We don't come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another."
"What is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?"