Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Makes
Life
Cannot
Human
Humans
Interminable
Self
Instances
Tension
Many
Instance
Feel
Debate
Feels
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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
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
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
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
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
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.
Anatole Broyard
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
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
