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We don't simply read books. We become them.

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
Simply
Books
Read
Become
Book

More quotes by 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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard