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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
Life
Makes
Cannot
Human
Humans
Interminable
Self
Instances
Many
Tension
Feel
Instance
Feels
Debate
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
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.
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
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
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.
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
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
Anatole Broyard
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
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.
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
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
