Quotes by Anatole Broyard

“Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.”

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Le...”

“There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience. ”

“I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--Im talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was ...”

“A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are da...”

“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port”

“Travel is like adultery; one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live...in our wanderlust, we are lovers loo...”

“We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.”

“To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.”

“When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.”

“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.”

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

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