Quotes from Harold Brodkey

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

This is something one must bear, beyond the claims of religion, not the idea of one's dying but the reality of one's death. One schools oneself in an acceptance of the terror. It is the shape that life takes toward its end. It is a form of life.

He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything...

I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.

He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child's heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.

Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and riven......I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of an event.

My mother's eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.

That spring when I was sixteen, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be a success when I grew up. I did not know that there was any other way of being loved.

I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality.

Like doesn't mean the same as: it means your mind goes in that direction and casts about among present possibilities like a hunting dog--or like a light from a flashlight...

And what is love? My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her. Her measure is for us to be together longer. I

They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman's room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other's arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace. Then

I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.

Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.