Quotes by Anatole Broyard

The contents of someones bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port

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.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

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.

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

Travel is like adultery; one is always tempted to be unfaithful to ones own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live...in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

To be misunderstood can be the writers punishment for having disturbed the readers peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.