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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.

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
Views
Sunset
Cities
River
Bookcase
Books
Dawn
Bookcases
Book
Storm
Zephyr
Much
Rivers
Panorama
Good
Sight
Dawns
City
Sunsets
View
Storms

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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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 first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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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.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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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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 contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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