Quote

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

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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
Even
Lovers
Like
Tend
Pages
Turn
Reluctant
Reading
Reads
Turns
Cling
Night
Stands
Book
Page

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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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.
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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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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.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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