Famous Quotes & Sayings

Harold Brodkey Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 54 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Harold Brodkey.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 663587

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 587657

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1652484

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1517618

I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 338352

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2249809

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 639463

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 652312

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1317632

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 917388

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1759227

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1910034

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1707081

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1706411

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1702324

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1697511

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1677420

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1648645

Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1617363

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1816587

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1834365

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1866877

But death's acquisitive instincts will win. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1449765

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1920757

This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1994848

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2081790

I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I'll come apart. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2121572

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2156487

You really can't write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2208302

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2219397

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 2256294

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1140314

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 371298

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 382547

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 452055

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 576616

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 616298

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 785881

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 850398

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 903980

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 905430

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 973379

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1089360

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1615839

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1261892

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1290247

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1314062

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1315252

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1357217

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1427550

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1441566

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been. — Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1448755

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1545477

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

Harold Brodkey Quotes 1614645

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