Harold Brodkey > Quotes

“I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.”
― Harold Brodkey

“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, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...”
― Harold Brodkey, Profane Friendship: A Novel

“I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead”
― Harold Brodkey

“Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.”
― Harold Brodkey

“God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.”
― Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

“There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St.Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That one shade of red brick and green foliage is St. Louis in the summer (the winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at school), and that brick and a pale sky is spring. It's also loneliness and the queer, self-pitying wonder that children whose families are having catastrophes feel. ”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.”
― Harold Brodkey

“He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child's heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.”
― Harold Brodkey

“My mother’s eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“Sometimes I can still sleep it off, my fear. My dreams are gentle now even when they are about being mugged, robbed and knocked down, even when I am pressing my car key into a bit of yielding earth. But often in the afternoons I wake after a nap with an awful sense of its being over and that it never meant much; I never had a life. The valuable sweetness and the hard work are infected by the fact of death: they no longer seem to have been so wonderful, but they are all I had. And then I want to be comforted. I want my old, unthreatening forms of silence, and comedy-and-cowardice. I want breath and stories and the world.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“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, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

“Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and riven......I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of an event.”
― Harold Brodkey

“I don't hate you. I love you."
"I love you, too. God, it's hell!"
They decided to be more sensible. The next day they didn't meet in Widener. Elgin stayed in his room, and at three o'clock the phone rang.
"It's me--Caroline."
"Oh God, you called. I was praying you would. Where are you?"
"In the drugstore on the corner." There was silence. "Elgin," she said at last, "did you have any orange juice today?"
He ran, down the stairs, along the sidewalk, to the drugstore to have his orange juice.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren't they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity--we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires...”
― Harold Brodkey, Women and Angels

“I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven......I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of an event.”
― Harold Brodkey

“I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“That spring when I was sixteen, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be a success when I grew up. I did not know that there was any other way of being loved.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love & Other Sorrows

“They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman’s room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other’s arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace. Then,”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“Desconfío de los compendios, de cualquier clase de paseo por el tiempo, de cualquier pretensión enfática de que uno controla lo que está narrando; aquel que afirma comprender y se queda tan tranquilo, aquel que afirma escribir con una emoción amparada en recuerdos serenos, es un tonto y un embustero. Comprender es temblar. Recordar es revivir y quedar desgarrado […] Admiro la autoridad de quien encara los hechos postrado de rodillas.”
― Harold Brodkey

“And what is love? My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her. Her measure is for us to be together longer. I”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“Like doesn't mean the same as: it means your mind goes in that direction and casts about among present possibilities like a hunting dog--or like a light from a flashlight...”
― Harold Brodkey

“Displease me, he seemed to say, and I'll get you. I'll make you fall in love with me and I'll turn you into a donkey.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love & Other Sorrows