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)
Tags: books library ancestry personal-history portraits
A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
Anatole BroyardTwo people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole BroyardTags: sex drowning intimacy resuscitation
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.
Anatole BroyardTags: children
A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987
Tags: books
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole BroyardIf a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
Anatole BroyardThe thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels.
Anatole BroyardI feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole BroyardThe most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it."
I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for.
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