60 Quotes by Anatole Broyard

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

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)

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.

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.

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

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.