Marcel Theroux Quotes

#1. What arrogance made us think we were far enough to be safe?

Marcel Theroux

#2. There is something talismanic about familiar words.

Marcel Theroux

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I have woken up to find that I am made of words.

Marcel Theroux

#6. No one tells you this, how having children multiplies your capacity for suffering.

Marcel Theroux

#7. 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

#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

#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

#10. Because before you acquired language, you didn't exist.

Marcel Theroux

#11. Everyone expects to be at the end of something. What no one expects is to be at the end of everything.

Marcel Theroux

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

Marcel Theroux

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

Marcel Theroux

#14. 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