Alexander Theroux famous quotes

03-28-2025

September: it was the most beautiful of words, heâ€™d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Beautiful #Regret #Flower
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

#Book #Use #Used
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

#Self #Views #Style
Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Essence #Hypocrisy #Problem
Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
-- Alexander Theroux

#People #Natural #Irritating
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

#Lying #Clothes #Soul
Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
-- Alexander Theroux

#Fire #Hands #Burning
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

#Stupid #Style #Enemy
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

#Artist #Circles #Differences
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Lonely #Loneliness #Privacy
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Loneliness #Failed Marriage
Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
-- Alexander Theroux

#Art #Taken #Artist
Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Yellow #Vagueness
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

#Black And White #Simple #Names
It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Names #Pet #Would Be
The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Reality #Men #Have Faith
Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Needs #Faculty #Shows
Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
-- Alexander Theroux

#Artist #Men #Differences
If on a friendâ€™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

#Faces #Firsts #Facts
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

#Eye #Self #World

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