“I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.” SexWomenFucking Author:Harold Brodkey
“People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren't they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity--we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires...” PeopleLifeUniverseCellsChemicalsUniversality Book:Women and Angels Source: Women and Angels
“Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and riven......I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of an event.” LifeQuotesFearLiesManipulationTrembleHarold Brodkey Author:Harold Brodkey
“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.” LoveWaitingGrowth Book:First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories Source: First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories
“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.” Childhood Author:Harold Brodkey
“I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.” EffortPersistence Author:Harold Brodkey
“I don't hate you. I love you." "I love you, too. God, it's hell!" They decided to be more sensible. The next day they didn't meet in Widener. Elgin stayed in his room, and at three o'clock the phone rang. "It's me--Caroline." "Oh God, you called. I was praying you would. Where are you?" "In the drugstore on the corner." There was silence. "Elgin," she said at last, "did you have any orange juice today?" He ran, down the stairs, along the sidewalk, to the drugstore to have his orange juice.” Orange Juice Book:First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories Source: First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories
“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...” FriendshipConnection Book:Profane Friendship: A Novel Source: Profane Friendship: A Novel