Harold Brodkey Quotes

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

Death is a fearful thing.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn't stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I'm done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.

We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'

I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

There is no flock, however watched and tended, but one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant chair.

The problem with death is absence

My mother was gone. The whole world should be black and cold. Nothing should look beautiful.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more - Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

Death makes sad stories of us all.

sometimes there's nothing to say about death.

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

Rafael, the Rat King, stared at the carnage with black-button eyes. "She is dead." "Ding dong, the witch is dead.

When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.