Best 39 quotes of Harold Brodkey on MyQuotes

Harold Brodkey

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

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

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    Harold Brodkey

    Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.

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    Harold Brodkey

    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.