Anatole Broyard > Quotes

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

(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)”
― Anatole Broyard

“Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“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 dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987”
― Anatole Broyard

“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. ”
― Anatole Broyard

“A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.”
― Anatole Broyard

“I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it."

I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for.”
― Anatole Broyard

“I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.”
― Anatole Broyard

“When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“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. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”
— Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”
― Anatole Broyard

“Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.”
― Anatole Broyard

“The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.”
― Anatole Broyard

“I’m filled with desire—to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.”
― Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness

“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

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

“I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel.... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.”
― Anatole Broyard

“The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels.”
― Anatole Broyard

“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like and ancestral portrait.”
― Anatole Broyard

“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 looking for consummation.”
― Anatole Broyard

“I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“I remember [Meyer] Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping.
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage”
― Anatole Broyard

“It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“When you look back over your life, the thing that amazes you most is your original capacity to believe. To grow older is to lose this capacity, to stop believing, or become unable to believe.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“Love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death. - Anatole Broyard in his dislike of "Lending Books" from editor Rabinowitz's collection "A Passion for Books”
― Anatole Broyard, Rabinowitz

“espadrilles.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“Betty is by now a rudderless drunk, cast out by her husband and making heavy weather around the bars of Versailles. Simenon is at his finest in establishing his heroine's fuzzy states of mind at this point. The novel then revolves about the relationship between Betty and Laure Lavancher, a physician's widow who takes Betty in and nurses her back to malevolence. Simenon readers know enough not to expect rainbows.”
― Anatole Broyard

“What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that’s what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir