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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
Present
Particular
Seems
Home
Aphorism
Generalization
Sorts
Writers
Seem

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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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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 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 first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard