Quote

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

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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
Humans
Interminable
Self
Instances
Many
Tension
Feel
Instance
Feels
Debate
Life
Makes
Cannot
Human

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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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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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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 contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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