Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Brodkey

The brag is booby-trapped. Brodkey opens with a comic flex - "thousands of opinions" - then immediately undercuts it with arithmetic humility: down from "millions". The line performs what it claims. You can feel a mind aging, refining, shedding the hot, busy certainty that fuels early ambition. It is also a sly self-portrait of the writer as someone professionally obligated to have opinions (on sentences, on people, on desire, on the century) while privately aware that opinions are often just well-lit guesses.

The rhythm matters: escalation, correction, confession. The dash gives you the sense of a man catching himself mid-vaunt, editing his ego in real time. That is classic Brodkey, whose work (especially The Runaway Soul) is obsessed with consciousness as a live wire: perception constantly revising itself, memory arguing with pride, intellect staging coups against impulse.

"I know nothing" isn't a Zen bumper sticker here; it's an artistic ethic and a defense mechanism. In the late 20th-century American literary scene - thick with theory, posture, and reputational knife-fights - claiming ignorance can be both genuine and tactical: a way to refuse the critic's demand for a definitive stance, to keep experience messy enough to write about. The subtext is grief, too: knowledge, in Brodkey's world, never arrives cleanly. What increases is not certainty but the awareness of how much the self invents to survive.

He isn't renouncing thought; he's downgrading it from empire to neighborhood. That contraction is the point: fewer opinions, sharper attention, more room for the uncomfortable truth that language can describe almost anything except final understanding.