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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

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
Contents
Portrait
Portraits
History
Someone
Part
Bookcase
Like
Bookcases
Ancestral

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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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 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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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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 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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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.
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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