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 LEWISI think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
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Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
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I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.
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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.
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There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
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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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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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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?
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In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.
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My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .
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But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.
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Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
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Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
SINCLAIR LEWIS