Top 68 Dreiser's Quotes

#1. Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #19391
#2. And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must succeed. That's what the world was made for. That's what he was made for. That was what he would have to do.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #57901
#3. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #66203
#4. If you have that unconquerable urge to write, nothing will stop you from writing.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #76689
#5. When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #82251
#6. She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom! Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #183406
#7. I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #185833
#8. The mystery of life
its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly ... has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #194384
#9. I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.

Louis Menand

Dreiser's Quotes #209638
#10. Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #214862
#11. All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #227460
#12. Remember, love is all a woman has to give, but it is the only thing which God permits us to carry beyond the grave.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #277797
#13. The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #297925
#14. It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.
- Oh, life! oh, youth! of, hope! oh, years! Oh pain-winged fancy, beating forth with fears.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #329258
#15. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #337647
#16. If we are to extract any joy out of our span, we must think and plan and make things better not only for ourselves but for others, since joy for ourselves depends upon our joy in others and theirs in us.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #360366
#17. Depend upon it; from every condition of distress or evil, there is a great reaction, and the greater the distress or evil, the greater the reaction.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #366103
#18. Only in rare instances and with rare individuals does there seem to be any guiding light from within.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #386201
#19. Nature, machine-like, works definitely and heartlessly, if in the main beautifully. Hence, if we, as individuals, do not make this dream of a god or what he stands for us real in our thoughts and deeds, then he is not real or true.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #407372
#20. When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #422705
#21. Every person according to his light," said Ames "You must help the world express itself. Use will make your powers endure ...

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #434139
#22. How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #444931
#23. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy ...

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #456532
#24. I will kneel and strike my breast, then touch the dust with my forehead; I will, I will. Only do not forsake me, oh god of beauty.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #499466
#25. The strong man wants to be allowed to DO; the little man wants to stop him.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #504270
#26. Dreiser ... I love ... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.

Marguerite Young

Dreiser's Quotes #513555
#27. I was a moral coward, and he was not losing his life and desires through fear - which the majority of us do.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #519574
#28. The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #641250
#29. A thought will color a world for us.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #670084
#30. It isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation ... all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #672113
#31. Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.

Edward Abbey

Dreiser's Quotes #689505
#32. To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love it is the one thing that solaces and delights.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #692064
#33. Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens
of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.

H.L. Mencken

Dreiser's Quotes #713035
#34. Why must women torment me so?

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #779426
#35. For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.

Dorothy Parker

Dreiser's Quotes #784988
#36. Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #809015
#37. Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #828799
#38. Oh, blessed are the children of endeavor in this, that they try and are hopeful. And blessed also are they who, knowing, smile and approve.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #836599
#39. Art is the stored honey of the human soul.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #844032
#40. What matter it if a man gaineth the whole world and loseth his own soul?

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #844780
#41. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking- chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #916826
#42. Shakespeare, I come !

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #919981
#43. What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

Dorothy Parker

Dreiser's Quotes #926580
#44. Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #935948
#45. Conservatism
hard work
saving one's money
looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #948333
#46. A real flame of love is a subtle thing. It burns as a will-o'-the-wisp, dancing onward to fairy lands of delight. It roars as a furnace. Too often jealousy is the quality upon which it feeds.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #963943
#47. I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1033231
#48. Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1150707
#49. Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1170984
#50. In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiring - if they are no more than butchers and bakers. By degrees one must account for this and that fact, and it was so here.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1201174
#51. She merely beamed a fatty beam. She was almost ponderous, and pink, with a tendency to a double chin.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1321007
#52. If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again. I cite the great civilizations of China and India.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1336890
#53. Your writer, your scientist, your chief official, all have lost the power to revive the early illusion concerning fame and high place. Their beauty and delight is like the mirage in the heavens, only plain to the eye outside; within is nothing.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1377790
#54. For a while he sat idly outside his door brooding in the spring sun.

In "The Lost Phoebe".

Dreiser Theodore

Dreiser's Quotes #1397970
#55. In short, he was one of those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and even larger phases of American natural development for their own aggrandizement.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1441494
#56. The best American writers have come from the hinterlands
Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

Edward Abbey

Dreiser's Quotes #1476957
#57. Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1503350
#58. Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1552536
#59. It is a sad thing to want for happiness, but it is a terrible thing to see another groping about blindly for it, when it is almost within the grasp.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1570111
#60. In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1594843
#61. How dismal is progress without publicity.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1666720
#62. You walk into a room, see a woman, and something happens. It's chemical. What are you going to do about it?

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1671330
#63. Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1740337
#64. Now. If any habits ever had time to fix upon her, they would have operated here. Habits are peculiar things. They will drive the really non-religious mind out of bed to say prayers that are only a custom and not a devotion. The victim of habit, when he has

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1753114
#65. We who feel that justice is not being done have but one thing to do: that is fight, by argument, by example, by insistence on fair play wherever we have the power to do so. The rest is in the hands of the Lord, or nature, which swings, apparently, from one extreme to another.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1819516
#66. His brain was his office.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1862336
#67. As they sang, this nondescript and indifferent street audience gazed, held by the peculiarity of such an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism and apathy of life.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1864408
#68. I have seen youths bright eyed and fair groping after bubbles in rapture, and conceiving them diamonds and the glitter of fine jewels, until their hand closed over a something that was not to be felt nor longer seen, mere colored air.

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's Quotes #1869282

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