Quote

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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Alexander Theroux
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 17
Novelist
Poet
Medford
Massachusetts
Alexander Louis Theroux
Faces
Kick
Cervantes
Fact
Kicks
Bookshelf
Facts
Hide
Burton
Cannot
Danger
Bookshelves
Find
Behinds
Joyce
Firsts
Friend
Curtain
First
Behind
Punch
Hard
Face
Curtains
Rabelais

More quotes by 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.
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It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
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The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
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The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.
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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.
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Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
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Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
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Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
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September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
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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.
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Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
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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.
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I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
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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.
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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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Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
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Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
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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.
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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 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