My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of meaningful communication over conflict in conversation.
Philip Roth's quote highlights the value of the English language as a tool for genuine communication rather than a battleground for verbal warfare. He suggests that conversations should be seen as opportunities to share insights and understanding, where words serve as gifts that convey deeper meanings and foster connection rather than merely weapons in an argument.
In practice
In a debate about the value of dialogue, I would use this quote to emphasize that conversations should enrich understanding rather than create conflict.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
Read like a wolf eats and write every day. Every. Single. Day.
Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.
How do we merge entertainment and education? We live in a world where entertainment wins, but if entertainment can have an educational heart, then we can really change people's lives.
Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.
When the primary people who have influence and power in our communities are not even really allowed to educate you on who to vote for and against, we're in trouble.
Education beats the beauty and the youth.
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