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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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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Divorce
Necessarily
Tragedy
Hundred
May
Firsts
First
World
Millionth

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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or reads for them.
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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