Strange Bodies Quotes

“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

“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

“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: A Novel

“Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“Because before you acquired language, you didn't exist.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“There is something talismanic about familiar words.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature – have something delicate and consensual about them.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“no one tells you this, how having children multiplies your capacity for suffering.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“too”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies: A Novel

“Every morning you slunk out of our house after breakfast, leaving behind the books and the smell of coffee....and like a spy going deep undercover into enemy territory, you entered a world that was a terrible inversion of everything I had taught you to value: a world shaped by toughness, boastful ignorance, firm gender stereotypes, underachievement, and the threat of violence.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

“That spark of new creation, the new phrase that genuinely surprises, the act that bears the impress of a live consciousness: these are astonishingly rare. Human beings are everywhere overcome by rituals and dead language, by threadbare notions about what is real.”
― Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies: A Novel