Harold Brodkey Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

Harold Brodkey
This is something one must bear, beyond the claims of religion, not the idea of one's dying but the reality of one's death. One schools oneself in an acceptance of the terror. It is the shape that life takes toward its end. It is a form of life.

Harold Brodkey
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...

Harold Brodkey
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.

Harold Brodkey
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 manoeuvres in our emergencies and longings.

Harold Brodkey
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.

Harold Brodkey
I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since1977, which is to say that my experience, myadventures in homosexuality took place largely in the1960s and '70s, and back then I relied on time and abstinence to indicate my degree of freedom from infectionand to protect others and myself.

Harold Brodkey