Alexander Theroux Quotes & Sayings

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people. — Alexander Theroux

One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it. — Alexander Theroux

The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going. — Alexander Theroux

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality. — Alexander Theroux

I thought ... their elegance ... lies not so much in their
clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta. — Alexander Theroux

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels. — Alexander Theroux

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all. — Alexander Theroux

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. — Alexander Theroux

Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs? — Alexander Theroux

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time. — Alexander Theroux

Nothing is more subtly destructive than a closed circle of artists feeding on one another. Envy grows from insignificant differences between people, not from overwhelming inequalities ... it was envy that forced them to emulate each other, not esteem. — Alexander Theroux

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined
with the imperative of accomplishing nothing. — Alexander Theroux

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow. — Alexander Theroux

The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity. — Alexander Theroux

A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. — Alexander Theroux

The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding. — Alexander Theroux

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time. — Alexander Theroux

Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery ... You belong to each other in what together you've made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors
neutral gray. — Alexander Theroux

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy. — Alexander Theroux

We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone. — Alexander Theroux

That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two was God. — Alexander Theroux

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education
the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap
and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk ... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money. — Alexander Theroux

The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy. — Alexander Theroux

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging. — Alexander Theroux

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret. — Alexander Theroux

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage. — Alexander Theroux

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both. — Alexander Theroux

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it. — Alexander Theroux

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away? — Alexander Theroux

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc. — Alexander Theroux

Silence is the unbearable repartee. — Alexander Theroux

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason. — Alexander Theroux

We are willing to lose ourselves in another as we exchange fates with one whom we love but on whom our heart is nevertheless impaled. — Alexander Theroux

If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain. — Alexander Theroux

The best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth. — Alexander Theroux

When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, 'It's an honor to speak to you,' I want to shoot myself. — Alexander Theroux

The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection for pot roast, hashed-brown potatoes, duck skin, butter, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, bananas and human thumb. — Alexander Theroux

Blue-shirt (Blauserk in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)
the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel The Ice-Shirt
is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness. — Alexander Theroux

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads. — Alexander Theroux

for too easily we come to love love first and not...that from which it comes. — Alexander Theroux

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc. — Alexander Theroux

Curiously, Laura Warholic is one of those novels in which the characters actually read books.You don't often see this in contemporary fiction. People resent polysyllabic words, find it showing off, never look them up, refuse to play. Words are to a writer what paint is to an artist. I am amazed at how readers refuse to enjoy the out-of-the-way fact, the astonishing detail, the original thought. Style is taken as an affront by stupid and lazy people. Just say it, they say. Sure! Should I die or should I live basically sums up Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. Why didn't he just say so!? — Alexander Theroux

Pedantry. The delight in living. Brio. The chance to act, to mime, to mock, to mimic. — Alexander Theroux