Quote

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.

Anatole Broyard

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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Time
Obedience
Expected
Expect
Relationship
Present
Everything
Nothing
Children
Opposed

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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.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
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The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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