70 Quotes by Harold Brodkey

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But death’s acquisitive instincts will win.