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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
Ancestral
Contents
Portrait
Portraits
History
Someone
Part
Bookcase
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Bookcases
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
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
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
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
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
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.
Anatole Broyard
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
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
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
