Quote

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

Anatole Broyard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
War
History
Tourism
Tourists
Irony
Wars
Winning

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

Image
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
Image
For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard