Anatole Broyard Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

Anatole Broyard
If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

Anatole Broyard
In their evolution through the centuries, children have exchanged the burden of work for the burden of love. Although they used to support themselves, they support us now with promises of the future.

Anatole Broyard
In a first reading, you're distracted by pleasure, excitement, curiosity. The book may so seize you that you rush through it in a kind of delirium.

Anatole Broyard
For that is one of the best things about love: the feeling of being wrapped, like a gift, in understanding.

Anatole Broyard
She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse.

Anatole Broyard
Here is a time when we expected nothing of children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything but obedience.

Anatole Broyard
The trouble with rereading is that it puts you out of sync with other people. They read the book in college and you reread it last week: there's bound to be some difference of opinion, and they won't love you for it.

Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Anatole Broyard
A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving. It's all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, but when you're sick you can let it go in all its garish colors.

Anatole Broyard
Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

Anatole Broyard
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 oneself.

Anatole Broyard
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

Anatole Broyard
Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them.

Anatole Broyard
A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.

Anatole Broyard