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

Alexander Theroux

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Alexander Theroux
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 17
Novelist
Poet
Medford
Massachusetts
Alexander Louis Theroux
Snobbery
Belonging
Hypocrisy
Essence
Problem

More quotes by Alexander Theroux

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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.
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I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
Alexander Theroux
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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.
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There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
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Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
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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
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September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux
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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
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Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
Alexander Theroux
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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
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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
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Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
Alexander Theroux
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I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.
Alexander Theroux
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Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
Alexander Theroux
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
Alexander Theroux
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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