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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
Pressed
Rome
Poem
Service
City
Cities

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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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