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Alexander Theroux

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“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”

RealSeemsTodayValuesLiteratureHouseCitiesFictionDisciplineFairsTraditionLonelyMilesCraftsFortyRoughSheepCandyPointlessSkullsCottonAthensMulesArcadiaQuillsCotton Candy
Author:Alexander Theroux
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“The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.”

MenSelfStudyWifeParticularHe ManSourceNeededPleaseHusbandMen And WomenDistanceDelightRageHatedFuelFrustrationObservingDissatisfactionMeasuringFurnacesVindicated
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“We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.”

WorldMeanEndsTimeRealizingMemoriesSinSecretGoneSadnessWillingLateClaimsStrangerPassingAdmirePassingsToo LateTime PassingTime PassesSecret LifeAdmiringInsufficiency
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“Adultery is the vice of equivocation. It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you've made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors--neutral gray.”

ArtMadeTwoTogetherLawUnderstandingIdentityColorProveThirdsVicesContentmentGrayDreadProvenAdulteryMockeryProve ItDesolateMerging
Author:Alexander Theroux
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“New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.”

MeanLittlesStatesMovingNationsSocialPoorTaxesProgramBottomAidsMedicalIncomeWelfareEggsExpectingRefugeAssistanceCapsInadequateIncome TaxSaving MoneyReactionariesSocial ServiceHampshireNew HampshireDuncesSales TaxCheapskates
Author:Alexander Theroux
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