Marcel Theroux QUOTES

1 " Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

2 " I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

3 " Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life. "

― Marcel Theroux , Strange Bodies

4 " There is something talismanic about familiar words. "

― Marcel Theroux , Strange Bodies

5 " ...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

6 " I thought it was a novel.”
“It is.”
“What’s it about??”
“You’ll have to buy it to find out, but it’s got everything: love, death and an amusing dog.”
“This one’s got a recipe for apple crumble,” I said.
“Don’t you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?” he said. "

― Marcel Theroux

7 " It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one? "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

8 " The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead. "

― Marcel Theroux , Strange Bodies

9 " He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad. "

― Marcel Theroux , Strange Bodies

10 " He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

11 " The love in a marriage turns like the lamp in a lighthouse, leaving you in darkness for long stretches, but it always comes back. I believe that but I can't tell whether it is a thought or a quotation. "

― Marcel Theroux

12 " Time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it's been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last awhile to come. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

13 " Standing on the bridge, looking across at that empty city, everything in the compass of my gaze had been set there by a human hand. Somehow those pylons had been strung with wire, and those towers raised, and roofs tiled. There had been food and drink for millions of mouths. I don't cry easy, but my vision blurred as I stared on the ruins of what we had been, and I watched the small band of men in rags move toward it to pick at it like birds on the carcass of some giant. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

14 " Imagine: If a man who shakes hands up and down meets a man who shakes hands side to side, what will happen?

Nathan looked perplexed but he extended his hand all the same. As they shook, their clasped hands went round and round in circles. "

― Marcel Theroux , The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes

15 " Vera spent about two hours one afternoon trying to make me appreciate the elegance of Lovelace’s procedure for calculating Bernoulli numbers. I pleaded with her, telling her, only half jokingly, that her explanation was wasted on an arts graduate. She looked thunderous. I had hit some intellectual sore point. “Don’t be proud of this false specialization that is killing wisdom,” she said. “There is no natural distinction between the arts and sciences.” “Well, one deals in facts,” I said. “The other doesn’t.” “So history is an art or a science?” she countered. Before I could reply, she added, “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky have also discovered the laws of nature.” “They were novelists, Vera. By definition, they made things up.” “You are so limited! Bill Gates also makes things up. Is he a novelist? Science, it’s a process of creation too. Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life. "

― Marcel Theroux , Strange Bodies

16 " What arrogance made us think we were far enough to be safe? "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

17 " I had always believed that right was like north to my father: a thing as real as sunlight, a place on the map, the arrow on a compass. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

18 " We don't get much of a spring or fall to speak of. Up here, for ten months a year, the weather has teeth in it. "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

19 " Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one? "

― Marcel Theroux , Far North

20 " ...the mustard on the roof of my mouth gave me the feeling that someone was removing my nasal hair with a blowtorch. "

― Marcel Theroux , The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes

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