9 quotes
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!
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, "Momma, do we believe in winter?"
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them — because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple. Not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt — and a mustache, but who am I to be picky.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
...and then this amazing creature — to whom no one has ever said "Shah!" or "I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!"
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles — and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech — look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)