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 perfe…

- Harold Brodkey

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

- Harold Brodkey

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 o…

- 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

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

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 …

- Harold Brodkey

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, …

- Harold Brodkey

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

- 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…

- Harold Brodkey