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Marcel Theroux Quotes

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

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

Marcel Theroux
Literature, Lines, Simulacrum
Marcel Theroux (2013). “Strange Bodies”, p.74, Faber & Faber

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
Hurt, Fighting, Men

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
Moving, Men, Hands

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
Letting Go, Children, Father
Marcel Theroux (2010). “Far North”, p.105, Faber & Faber

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
Book, Mind, Needs
Marcel Theroux (2013). “Strange Bodies”, p.37, Faber & Faber

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