“Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.”

We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?

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.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

An it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires – though a lot of churches are that, too.

When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.

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.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.

It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.

The time to hesitate is through no time to wallowin the mire Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre

Which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division it were better to be without it.

We are a people in more need of a little character than we are in need of an abundance of knowledge.

Do not become the candle that gives light to others but itself remains in darkness.

This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.

It was like she’d become the sun, and I started revolving around her. She was my center.

Don’t become me. Don’t let her down like I did. You only deserve what you make yourself worthy of. Do what I couldn’t. Be a man.