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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

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
Tones
Classical
Native
Tone
Anxiety
Fiction
American
Form
Fosters

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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.
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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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.
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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.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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.
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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.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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 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.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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.
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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.
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