Harold Brodkey Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

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.

You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.