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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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
Cities
Pressed
Rome
Poem
Service
City

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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.
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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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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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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 remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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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.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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