"The Human Stain" Quotes

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong.

You think you are better than everybody else in the world. But you are not, you are just worse.

The pleasure we feel in being with the one we love is not a pleasure of the senses but of the spirit.

You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this: the older you get, the more you need to protect yourself from sadness, because sadness will only encourage depression.

Do you think I am so stupid as not to know that all human history is nothing but a record of the filthiest crime? What do you take me for, a child?

I think it is high time that we all grow up and that we stop getting angry over things that don't matter.

The tyranny of the regular. The regular, the normal, is this: that is the real enemy.

There is no true love without jealousy.

It's all about the illusion of control. We're all just pretending to be in charge of our lives.

People are like animals. They run in packs. If you want to be left alone, you have to act like a wolf.