Darconville's Cat Quotes

“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, Darconville's Cat

“The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“The best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined
with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two was God.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their stomachs and blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was formed! It was now an assembly on the arch, an enthusiastic troop of dunces, pasquil-makers, populist scribblers and lick-penny poets, anti-intellectual hacks, modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules of prose and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities! They pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along waggling codpieces, shaking hogs' bladders, and bugling from the fundament! Some sang, shrill, purposely mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to mock it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses and roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and turned somersaults with quills in their ears to make each other laugh, lest they speak and then finally came to the lip of a monstrously large hole, a crater-like opening miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they circled in an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant bells! A bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on that pole a huge banner, to hysterical applause, was suddenly unfurled and upon it, upsidedown, were written the words: "In The End Was Wordlessness."”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“for too easily we come to love love first and not...that from which it comes.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Art creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“I have no aspiration here to reclaim mystery and paradox from whatever territory they might inhabit, for there is, indeed, often a killing in a kiss, a mercy in the slap that heats your face . . . There is, nevertheless, a particular poverty in those alloplasts who, addressing tragedy, seek to subdistinguish motives beyond those we have best, because nearest, at hand, and so it is with love and hate--emotions upon whose necks, whether wrung or wreathed, may be found the oldest fingerprints of man. A simple truth intrudes: the basic instincts of every man to every man are known. But who knows when or where or how? For the answers to such questions, summon Augurello, your personal jurisconsult and theological wiseacre, to teach you about primal reality and then to dispel those complexities and cabals you crouch behind in this sad, psychiatric century you call your own. It is the anti-labyrinths of the world that scare. Here is a story for you. Your chair.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“I WANT TO BE what I was when I wanted to be what I am now”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“all the time you hate you steal it from love, its sole provocation, for it does not precede the facts that call it forth; it nourishes itself on them. Dichromatism always extends to the complementary colors. You commit in one exactly everything you simultaneously omit in the other. They exist side by side to kill each other, like the heterosporous combination of cedar and chokecherry. What, after all, is the precise morphological distinction between an embrace and a strangulation? L’amour, la mort: every kiss muffles a bite. Inside every lover is manacled Taras Bulba. The anagram of ‘The heart’s desire’ is ‘hate strides here’—the imperfection in the transposition being the apostrophe you can’t cry out.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“I am indifferent to both sexes, for to love man is possibly to love women by sentimental transfer. The essential trouble with sex, you see, is that it brings one close to people. And I personally find people irritating.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Darconville drew it all out to this paradox, that on the one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute...”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“And then they set off through the snow in the direction of Southwark for their Christmas dinner at the old Anchor Tavern, situated on an obscure but romantic waterside lane by the dark-working Thames. It was a night like nothing else on earth, not so much for the crackling fire and candles, nor the traditional rejoicing, nor the delicious fare of roast beef, Yorkshire, and Christmas pudding, but rather because it all touched to the heart of symbol itself, foreordained somehow by fate as if to assure at least two small insignificant people that the possibility of a supreme incomprehensible peace had not gone from the world and so perhaps never would: it was one with the other, one through the other, one in the other, one for the other, always. It wasn’t only love. God had visited them.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“It was very cold and late when Darconville and Isabel left the inn and stepped into a blowing snowy wind that glanced even colder off the river. Inexplicably, he suggested that they walk up to London Bridge, but Isabel, as her feet were freezing, suggested they could postpone that and laughingly pulled him in the opposite direction; urging her, however, he somehow prevailed—and so up they went and, once there, looked over the water toward the reflecting lights of the dark city across the way. Without a word, he placed a small box in her hand. Her eyes filled with tears as she opened it: it was a diamond-ring. “I love you,” she whispered, her face outshining it by far, as he slipped it on her finger. “I will always love you.” And flushed with ardor, she kissed him, wrapping herself around him in an embrace, as ivy does an oak, so long it seemed she might get the heart out of him, and there they remained, hovering forever, holding each other so close no one could have known they lived, unmoving in the past perfect tense until the bells of Southwark pealed midnight to wake them to a new birth, whereupon, walking slowly across the bridge in a snowfall of fable, they went home together in silence hand in hand.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Potato,” observed Prof. Wratschewe, graciously bowing a cup of punch to his colleague. “Did you ever stop to think that if ‘gh’ stood for ‘p’ as in ‘hiccough’; ‘ough’ for ‘o’ as in ‘dough’; ‘phth’ for ‘t’ as in ‘phthisis’; ‘eigh’ for ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’; ‘tte’ for ‘t’ as in ‘gazette’; and ‘eau’ for ‘o’ as in ‘beau’ “—he snapped out his ball-point and scribbled on a flattened cup—”then the correct spelling of potato would be ghoughphtheightteeau?” He looked up smiling.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“A real gambler always returns the money he's won.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Love is not simply what it is, for in this matter, strictly speaking, what it is implies also what it ought to be, and as it exists always in a state of becoming, when it exists at all, it is never fully in a state of being. You define it only by preventing its development and preventing its development you hazard its loss. You circumscribe it only by limiting it.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“The opposite of faith, he realized, was not believing in nothing but rather believing in anything.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“you can never love too early, you can only love too late.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Expectation is temptation. Where there's a won't there's a way.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“There is an unhappiness so awful that the very fear of it becomes becomes an alloy to happiness.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“With lovers : with enemies—how strange!—there, in each, can one always find both a stimulus and a lesson.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“a human being perhaps cannot love another whom he fully understands or effectively comprehends because the very nature of the ideal discommends the empirical or rationalistic approach to wisdom through analysis, always a felony in matters of love.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Our ideals are our perils. The heart of the loved one is an autoclave in which you have placed your own. Ravens bleed from their eyes during coition.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Perspective as seen, he thought, is never reality. Wasn't a stopped clock correct twice a day? In fact, perspective was anti-creative, for if we painted what we actually saw—reality, say—we'd literally have to paint double images. Compensating, compromising, we look toward dead center only to contact what we'd know, to scrutinize the inscrutable.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“The very nature of art—failures by which man sought to memorize his experience—spiritually underdeveloped the very disciples who most needed to know what it wasn't, could not be, able to do. The symbol of art is the tombstone, thought Darconville, an obelisk sticking up out of the earth with the inscription, "I count”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat