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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.

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
Book
Feel
Wedlock
Feels
Lending
Way
Daughters
Men
Fathers
Daughter
Living
Father

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
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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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