First Love and Other Sorrows Quotes

“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.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St.Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That one shade of red brick and green foliage is St. Louis in the summer (the winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at school), and that brick and a pale sky is spring. It's also loneliness and the queer, self-pitying wonder that children whose families are having catastrophes feel. ”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“My mother’s eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“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.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“Displease me, he seemed to say, and I'll get you. I'll make you fall in love with me and I'll turn you into a donkey.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love & Other Sorrows

“That spring when I was sixteen, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be a success when I grew up. I did not know that there was any other way of being loved.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love & Other Sorrows

“They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman’s room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other’s arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace. Then,”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

“Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.”
― Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories