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All Quotes by author - Harold Brodkey
" Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set. "
Television
Almost
Buy
" 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. "
Me
Myself
Time
" But death's acquisitive instincts will win. "
Will
Death
Win
" Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste. "
Pure
Head
Collision
" 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. "
Real
Death
Me
" 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. "
Time
Sleep
Live
" 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. "
I Am
Life
Moments
" 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. "
Knowledge
Time
Way
" 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. "
Two
Like
Expect
" I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not. "
Sorry
Sweet
You
" 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. "
Interesting
Looking
You
" I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing. "
Down
Opinions
Always
" 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. "
Accomplishment
See
Look
" 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. "
Moment
New York
Party
" 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. "
Live
End
Sister
" 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. "
Death
Universe
Light
" 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. "
Loss
Wild
Darkness
" 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. "
Crazy
New York
Pressure
" 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. "
Were
End
Head
" 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. "
Me
Think
Reputation
" Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been. "
Been
Radio
Always
" 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. "
Revolution
Events
Death
" This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over. "
Speech
Over
Cast
" 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. "
People
Birth
Like
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