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"But death's acquisitive instincts will win."
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"Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.Put out the light, and then put out the light:If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,I can again thy former light restore,Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,I know not where is that Promethean heatThat can thy light relume."

"Susan stared at him.The blue glow in Death's eyes gradually faded, and as the light died it sucked at her gaze so that it was dragged into the eye sockets and into the darkness beyond, which went on and on, for ever. There was no word for it. Even eternity was a human idea. Giving it a name gave it a length; admittedly, a very long one. But this darkness was what was left when eternity had given up. It was where Death lived. Alone."
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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