Top 45 Brodkey Quotes

#1. Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #49147
#2. I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #72091
#3. I feel sorry for the man who marries you ... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #144576
#4. In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #268913
#5. I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #333123
#6. Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #346093
#7. 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

Brodkey Quotes #353382
#8. It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #354446
#9. Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #455329
#10. 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

Brodkey Quotes #487163
#11. 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

Brodkey Quotes #487492
#12. I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #584951
#13. 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

Brodkey Quotes #628973
#14. I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #650226
#15. 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

Brodkey Quotes #660512
#16. 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

Brodkey Quotes #743624
#17. Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #776494
#18. If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet ... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #782565
#19. I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #786461
#20. 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

Brodkey Quotes #840738
#21. 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

Brodkey Quotes #951502
#22. I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #957828
#23. A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

Michael Dirda

Brodkey Quotes #1034293
#24. 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

Brodkey Quotes #1048602
#25. Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1137344
#26. Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1211604
#27. It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1216984
#28. My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1296241
#29. 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

Brodkey Quotes #1338970
#30. You really can't write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1355604
#31. 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

Brodkey Quotes #1423563
#32. I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I'll come apart.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1459929
#33. I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1465024
#34. But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1514102
#35. Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1556577
#36. This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1579741
#37. It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1605213
#38. I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

Edmund White

Brodkey Quotes #1622660
#39. 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 maneuvers in our emergencies and longings.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1639344
#40. True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1667469
#41. I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1670580
#42. I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1698483
#43. Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1735994
#44. So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1747087
#45. Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

Harold Brodkey

Brodkey Quotes #1825822

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