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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
Clear
Ended
Ends
Bringing
Complete
Leaving
Memory
Memories
Evasive
Head
Chapel
Prayer
Aside

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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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Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been
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You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.
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I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.
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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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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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I often thought men stank of rage it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.
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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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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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Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.
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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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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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But death's acquisitive instincts will win.
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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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My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.
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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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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.
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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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Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.
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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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