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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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
Things
Subtly
Distressing
Inappropriate
Gift
Close
Someone

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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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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.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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