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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

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
Generalization
Sorts
Writers
Seem
Present
Particular
Seems
Home
Aphorism

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard