“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”

‘About Books, Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling’, New York Times, February 22, 1987.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait." by Anatole Broyard?

Anatole Broyard5

American literary critic 1920–1990

Related quotes

“At home these men’s works [ Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

as translated by E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (1955), p. 115
Young Törless (1966)

“The artists is responsible for his history and his nature, his history is part of his nature.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

after 1967 - posthumous
Source: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 32 note 1.

“You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Statement to Nikita Khrushchev, as quoted in The New York Post (1 April 1959), and in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary of Amoral Advice (1984) by Jonathon Green, p. 184