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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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Alexander Theroux
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 17
Novelist
Poet
Medford
Massachusetts
Alexander Louis Theroux
Depends
Says
Read
Use
Used
Book
Much
Dictionary
Asked

More quotes by 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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Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.
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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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
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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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Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
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 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
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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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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
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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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Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
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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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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September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux
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There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
Alexander Theroux
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Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
Alexander Theroux
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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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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
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Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
Alexander Theroux