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"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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"I am very grateful for all the opportunities life has given me."

"My mission in life is to be kind, compassionate, caring, sharing and loving in order to feel the deepest joy of life."

"The spirit of life, the spirit of peace."
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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