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

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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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