Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Alexander Theroux

Image
Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
Alexander Theroux
Image
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.
Alexander Theroux
Image
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
Alexander Theroux
Image
September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux
Image
I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
Alexander Theroux
Image
The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.
Alexander Theroux
Image
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
Image
Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
Alexander Theroux