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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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Alexander Theroux
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 17
Novelist
Poet
Medford
Massachusetts
Alexander Louis Theroux
Holds
Enemies
Critics
Stupid
Style
Willfully
Enemy
Misunderstand
Must
Thankfully
Crucifixion

More quotes by 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.
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Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
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Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
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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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Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
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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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Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
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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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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
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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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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.
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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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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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September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
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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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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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Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
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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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