Quotes from Anatole Broyard

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.

The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience. Source?

Such a fatigue of adjectives, a drone of alliterations, a huffing of hyphenated words hurdling the meter like tired horses. Such a faded upholstery of tears, stars, bells, bones, flood and blood†a thud of consonants in tongue, night, dark, dust, seed, wound and wind.

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldnt wait to leave.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait." ( About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling , New York Times, February 22, 1987)

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it." I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for.

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.

I'm filled with desire—to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.