Harold Brodkey Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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 is obviously calk, 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 the event.

  Harold Brodkey

  Liars, Writing, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

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

  Harold Brodkey

  Struggle, Writing, Kind

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• I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

  Harold Brodkey

  Opinion, Stills, Knows

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• 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

  Prayer, Memories, Leaving

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• 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

  Health, Athlete, Exercise

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• 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

  Perfect, Contentment, Entering

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• 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

  Accomplishment, Looks, Merit

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• 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

  Reality, Illumination, Drunk

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• I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

  Harold Brodkey

  People, My Thoughts

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• 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

  Spring, Butterfly, Wind

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• 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

  Sleep, Odds, Decay

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• 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

  Degrees, Abstinence, Homosexuality

  1996 This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Said Life, People, Disparity

  Harold Brodkey (2011). “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode”, p.287, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Loneliness, Past, Self

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• I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I’ll come apart.

  Harold Brodkey

  Memories, Hard, Ifs

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• 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

  Way, Metamorphosis, Young

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• I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.

  Harold Brodkey

  Men, Rage, Homosexual

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• Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.

  Harold Brodkey

  Announcements, Has Beens, Written

  Remark about his articles tracing the course of his illness in the NewYorker. Quoted in his obituary in The Scotsman, 29 Jan1996.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Long Ago, People, Stories

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• 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

  New York, Thinking, Anchors

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• Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

  Harold Brodkey

  Kicking It, Alive, Radio

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• Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.

  Harold Brodkey

  Television, Firsts, Ill

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• But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

  Harold Brodkey

  Winning, Instinct

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• I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

  Harold Brodkey

  Sweet, Sorry, Home

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• Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.

  Harold Brodkey

  Halls, Vague

  1996 This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

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