The Human Stain
Critique • Quotes
First publication
2000
Literature form
Novel
Genres
Literary
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 129,000 words
Notable lines
It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college.
— First line
The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he's telling you something about the two of you.... Most men never find such a friend.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions....
"Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything.
As it is a human thing to know a secret, it is also a human thing, sooner or later, to reveal it.
Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America.
— Last line
Critique • Quotes