This Wild Darkness Quotes

“God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“Sometimes I can still sleep it off, my fear. My dreams are gentle now even when they are about being mugged, robbed and knocked down, even when I am pressing my car key into a bit of yielding earth. But often in the afternoons I wake after a nap with an awful sense of its being over and that it never meant much; I never had a life. The valuable sweetness and the hard work are infected by the fact of death: they no longer seem to have been so wonderful, but they are all I had. And then I want to be comforted. I want my old, unthreatening forms of silence, and comedy-and-cowardice. I want breath and stories and the world.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“And what is love? My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her. Her measure is for us to be together longer. I”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death