The Human Stain

The Human Stain Quotes

When a disgraced former college dean has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark, twisted past, he is forced to confront a shocking fact about his own life that he has kept secret for 50 years.

Coleman Silk: Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?
Faunia Farley: Action is the enemy of thought.
Nathan Zuckerman: I'm writing a book... it's called 'The Human Stain'.
Herb Keble: Coleman Silk and his wife Iris were betray by the moral stupidity of a censorious and coercive community. And I was a part of that community. We all were.
Faunia Farley: You're a crow... who doesn't know how to be a crow.
Faunia Farley: [dancing provocatively] You're way too young for me. I need a man much older than you. At least 100. Know anyone in a wheelchair?
Young Coleman Silk: Dance For Me.
Mrs. Silk: Coleman, you think like a prisoner. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.
Faunia Farley: You can't go out there, he's fuckin' crazy.
Coleman Silk: Yeah, so am I.
[picks up a baseball bat]
Young Coleman Silk: [giving eulogy] Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant only taste death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.
Mrs. Silk: You need to be proud of your race.
Young Coleman Silk: What about me? What about just being proud of being me? It's my life.
Ernestine: People are just getting dumber, but more opinionated.
Nelson Primus: How do you know she doesn't want to use you to make up for all that she's lost? Do I represent you in a paternity suit, Coleman? "Give up the girl, Achilles." I took your intro to European lit umpteen years ago as an undergrad. Give her up, and your troubles go away.
Steena Paulsson: I want to spend my life with you.
Young Coleman Silk: What are you doing Sunday?
Coleman Silk: You can't make a college without breaking egg heads, and uh, I couldn't write a book called Spooks that didn't sound like the raving of a lunatic.
Young Coleman Silk: So, that's an... What is it? Swedish?
Steena Paulsson: Close, it's Danish and Icelandic.
Nathan Zuckerman: Coleman, every mistake a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator. The things that restore you can also destroy you.
Psychologist: Did you ever kill anyone when you were in Vietnam, Mr. Farley?
Lester Farley: Did I kill anyone?
Psychologist: Um hmm.
Lester Farley: Isn't that what I was supposed to do when I went to fuckin' Vietnam, fuckin' kill gooks? They said everything goes, so everything went.
[last lines]
Lester Farley: You know my secret place. You know everything now, don't you Mr. Zuckerman? But you won't tell, will you?
Nathan Zuckerman: [slowly turns to walk away]
Lester Farley: Hey, the book. Send me one.
Nathan Zuckerman: It's in the mail.
Mrs. Silk: Funny, I never thought of you as black or white. Golden, you were my golden child.
Mrs. Silk: Funny I never thought of you as black or white. Gold. You were my golden child.
Nathan Zuckerman: [voiceover] 1998 was the summer of sanctimony. After the fall of Communism and before the horrors of terrorism, there was a brief interlude when the nation was preoccupied by cock sucking.
Mrs. Silk: Coleman, you think like a prisoner. You're white as snow, and you think like a slave.

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