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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
Image
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Image
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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