Harold Brodkey Quotes

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

  Harold Brodkey

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

  Harold Brodkey

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• 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.

  Harold Brodkey

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• I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since1977, which is to say that my experience, my adventures 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 infection—and to protect others and myself.

  Harold Brodkey

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• 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.

  Harold Brodkey

• This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

  Harold Brodkey

• So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events – pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

  Harold Brodkey

• Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Harold Brodkey

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

  Harold Brodkey

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

  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.

  Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey (28)

Birth:	25th October, 1930
Death:	26th January, 1996
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Harold Brodkey was born in Staunton, Illinois, USA. He was an American short-story writer and novelist. After graduating from Harvard University in 1952, he began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His Short-story collections include: First Love and Other Sorrows, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, and The World Is the Home of Love and Death. He wrote other books include: The Runaway Soul(novel), Profane friendship(novel), This Wild Darkness(memoir), My Venice, and Sea battles on dry land(essays).

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