Quote

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

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
Simply
Books
Read
Become
Book

More quotes by 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
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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
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
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
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
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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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 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
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
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
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard