ellauri109.html on line 569: Roth was flattened by “Leaving a Doll’s House” and the bad publicity that came with it. He never got over it. “You know what Chekhov said when someone said to him ‘This too shall pass?’ ” Roth told Bailey. “ ‘Nothing passes.’ Put that in the fucking book.”
ellauri111.html on line 261: “I suppose you know that jury trials were still quite an innovation in my time in Russia, so it’s no surprise that they produced some odd results. A clever lawyer could easily persuade a jury one way or another. Even when all the facts pointed to the guilt of the accused, even when it was admitted that, indeed, such-and-such a woman had attacked her lover’s wife with a razor with the intention of killing her, such-and-such a father had so violently beaten his seven-year old daughter with birch rods that even the neighbours were terrified by her screams, or such-and-such parents had treated their children like animals, keeping them in filthy conditions, and beating them with leather straps, again and again—each time our poor soft-hearted jurors concluded ‘Not guilty!’ Can you imagine? Of course, there is always an explanation, there are always attenuating circumstances, there can even be provocations, and the letter of the law may tell us this is not torture but simply punishment, the kind of punishment that, in those days, all good middle-class parents thought it right to mete out so as to give their children a sense of duty. The facts. The facts are the facts, but the truth once uttered is a lie, and even the facts can be put together in such a way as to turn even torture into well-meaning parental discipline.”
ellauri111.html on line 303: “Exactly! It’s a performance. It’s not the heart speaking. The heart would say something very different. In fact, the heart wouldn’t need to say very much at all: it has only one thing to say, to love and to ask for love, to forgive and to ask forgiveness. We’ve been talking about people who commit crimes but won’t own up to what they’ve done, people who want to say to anyone who’ll listen: ‘Not guilty! My conscience is clear! Don’t blame me!’ But the real problem is not the evidence of the facts—did he or didn’t he do this or say that. The real problem is that this is completely back to front. The person who loves, even if they haven’t committed any crimes, is the person who wants to be guilty, who doesn’t just want to forgive but wants to be forgiven; the person who thinks of themselves not only as guilty but infinitely guilty, guilty of everything, before everyone, in fact the guiltiest one of all.”
ellauri164.html on line 879: This interpretation is solidified by Moses’ words about this event in the Book of Deuteronomy. Three times in the first four chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses says that he is not able to enter the Promised Land because of Israel. At first glance, again, this might seem an unfair charge. Moses had caused his own exclusion, hadn’t he? Why is he accusing the generation after the event in Numbers 20 of being the cause of his failure? If we look at these three mentions, we see a few important facts. In the first instance, Deuteronomy 1:37, Moses is recounting the failure of Israel when they listened to the 10 spies’ negative report and how God forbade that generation from entering the Promised Land, and he then says “The Lord was angry with me also on your account, saying, ‘Not even you shall enter there.’” Moses associates his inability to enter the Promised Land with Israel’s rebellion and unfaithfulness, but he also seems to be lumping the people’s refusal to enter the land (Numbers 13-14) with his own sin in Numbers 20. This is not Moses forgetting the chronology of these two events, but rather indicating that they are closely associate with one another.
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