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Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

Harold Brodkey

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Harold Brodkey
Age: 65 †
Born: 1930
Born: October 25
Died: 1996
Died: January 26
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Staunton
Illinois
Aaron Roy Weintraub
Memory
Memories
Evasive
Head
Chapel
Prayer
Aside
Clear
Ended
Ends
Bringing
Complete
Leaving

More quotes by Harold Brodkey

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I often thought men stank of rage it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.
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Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.
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I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.
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the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting that is, they ache until they atrophy.
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I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.
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Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don't always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our maneuvers in our emergencies and longings.
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I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.
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Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.
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The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything.
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If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.
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Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.
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I'm sixty-two, and it's ecological sense to die while you're still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young.
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In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.
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My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.
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It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.
Harold Brodkey
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I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work
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I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.
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Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.
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But death's acquisitive instincts will win.
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Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been
Harold Brodkey