Quote

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

Anatole Broyard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Everything
Sometimes
Aristocracy
Happier
Blame
Seems
Government
Might

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

Image
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
Image
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
Image
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard