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

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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.
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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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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.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
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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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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.
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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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