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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.
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
Self
Instances
Many
Tension
Feel
Instance
Feels
Debate
Life
Makes
Cannot
Human
Humans
Interminable
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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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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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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