To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
SINCLAIR LEWISIntellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want — and what I want now is a drink.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
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Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.
SINCLAIR LEWIS