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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.

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
Pieces
Parent
Gristle
Read
Haunt
Book
Lover
Like
Teeth
Lovers
Piece
Meant

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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.
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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.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, a centrifugal tendency. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
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In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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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.
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A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.
Anatole Broyard
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or reads for them.
Anatole Broyard