Top 100 Quotes About Sinclair Lewis
#1. Carter is doing a high-wire act over a cesspool, preaching all the way. Sinclair Lewis, thou shouldst be living in this hour. We have a Warren Harding impersonating Elmer Gantry.
Jimmy Carter
#2. Sinclair Lewis was asked one time to give a talk to class of students about writing. When he got there he asked the class, Do you people want to be writers?and they all said yes. Then Lewis said, Why the hell aren't you at home writing?
Tom T. Hall
#3. Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
Jane Smiley
#4. Another superb movie about a mature marriage grounded in a fundamental lack of communication is Dodsworth, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel.
Jeanine Basinger
#5. I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
Fay Wray
#6. As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.
Sinclair Lewis
#7. All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.
Sinclair Lewis
#8. Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?
Sinclair Lewis
#9. She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets.
Sinclair Lewis
#10. On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose.
Sinclair Lewis
#11. Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town.
Sinclair Lewis
#12. What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Sinclair Lewis
#13. HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
Sinclair Lewis
#14. The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Sinclair Lewis
#15. He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.
Sinclair Lewis
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
Sinclair Lewis
#19. If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil.
Sinclair Lewis
#20. The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.
Sinclair Lewis
#21. When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.
Sinclair Lewis
#22. Indians, of course, have no "theology," and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
Sinclair Lewis
#23. Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
#24. The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day.
Sinclair Lewis
#26. He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason
Sinclair Lewis
#27. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth ...
Sinclair Lewis
#29. Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
Sinclair Lewis
#30. No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.
Sinclair Lewis
#31. Why, America's the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen here!
Sinclair Lewis
#32. Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
Sinclair Lewis
#33. World." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework - Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It
Sinclair Lewis
#35. The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
Sinclair Lewis
#36. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager.
Sinclair Lewis
#37. There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.
Sinclair Lewis
#38. The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.
Sinclair Lewis
#39. He said brokenly many things beautiful in their common-ness.
Sinclair Lewis
#40. Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
Sinclair Lewis
#41. There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!
Sinclair Lewis
#42. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
Sinclair Lewis
#43. To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.
Sinclair Lewis
#44. And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.
Sinclair Lewis
#45. Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another's movements than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to know, where all the others had been every minute of the week.
Sinclair Lewis
#46. When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Sinclair Lewis
#47. 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 Lewis
#48. In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.
Sinclair Lewis
#49. There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
Sinclair Lewis
#51. In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.
Sinclair Lewis
#52. When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!
Sinclair Lewis
#53. 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.
Sinclair Lewis
#54. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.
Sinclair Lewis
#55. Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
Sinclair Lewis
#56. A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.
Sinclair Lewis
#57. The Wonderlust
probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.
Sinclair Lewis
#59. Oh, quit it! You're the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.
Sinclair Lewis
#60. There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
Sinclair Lewis
#61. All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive.
Sinclair Lewis
#62. [ ... ] all of the good-intentioners who wanted to 'do something for the common people' were insignificant, because the 'common people' were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact.
Sinclair Lewis
#63. But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus," insisted John Pollikop ... "You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper.
Sinclair Lewis
#64. More and more, as I think about history, I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.
Sinclair Lewis
#65. freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate the rights of the Mob.
Sinclair Lewis
#66. Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?
Sinclair Lewis
#67. Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
Sinclair Lewis
#68. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever.
Sinclair Lewis
#69. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.
Sinclair Lewis
#70. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
Sinclair Lewis
#71. Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred
Sinclair Lewis
#72. In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is - a business administration !
Sinclair Lewis
#73. The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.
Sinclair Lewis
#74. 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
#75. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?
Sinclair Lewis
#76. You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Sinclair Lewis
#77. The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
Sinclair Lewis
#78. Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
Sinclair Lewis
#79. Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis
#80. I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me
I actually took my teachers seriously!
Sinclair Lewis
#81. I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott
Sinclair Lewis
#82. It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
Sinclair Lewis
#83. The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14
Sinclair Lewis
#84. Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.
Sinclair Lewis
#85. his secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher, Lee Sarason, yielded nothing to others'.
Sinclair Lewis
#86. Whatever she might become she would never be static.
Sinclair Lewis
#87. I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can.
Sinclair Lewis
#88. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Sinclair Lewis
#89. In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.
Sinclair Lewis
#90. Lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no
Sinclair Lewis
#91. Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
Sinclair Lewis
#92. 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
#93. The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.
Sinclair Lewis
#94. For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
Sinclair Lewis
#95. What an eternal art it is
such a glittery delightful art
finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves!
Sinclair Lewis
#96. I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be - nothing.
Sinclair Lewis
#97. And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, 'What do you think of John Wesley's doctrine of perfection?'
'Oh, it's absolutely sound and proven,' admitted Elmer, wondering what the devil Mr. Wesley's doctrine of perfection might be.
Sinclair Lewis
#98. Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
Sinclair Lewis
#99. The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is ... "
Sinclair Lewis
#100. There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!
Sinclair Lewis
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