Top 30 Harold Brodkey Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Harold Brodkey

2. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

4. “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

5. “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...”

— Harold Brodkey

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

9. “In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...”

— Harold Brodkey

10. “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

11. “My protagonists are my mother’s voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.”

— Harold Brodkey

12. “Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.”

— Harold Brodkey

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

17. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

22. “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

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

— Harold Brodkey

24. “But death’s acquisitive instincts will win.”

— Harold Brodkey

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey

29. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

32. “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.”

— Harold Brodkey

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

— Harold Brodkey