Quotes from John Dos Passos

I'm going to drink till when I cut myself whiskey runs out. What's the good of blood when you can have whiskey?

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That's the only sublime thing.

And don't forget this, if a man's a success in New York, he's a success!

If any man has a ghost Bourne has a ghost a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York, crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the State.

I'm beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want," said Herf quietly. "At least I'm beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.

When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls. . . . But now you must listen to me for the last time. . . . For the last time I say. . . . Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside.

There's a long long trail awinding . . . Over there! Over there! In the subway their eyes pop as they spell out APOCALYPSE, typhus, cholera, shrapnel, insurrection, death in fire, death in water, death in hunger, death in mud.

But how glum he looks now. She threw some daisies at him. Then, after a pause, she added mockingly: It's hunger, my dear. Good Lord, how dependent men are on food!

Oh I know darling, it's nothing but money in New York.

There are lives to be lived if only you didn't care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits . . .?

If only I still had faith in words.

Then all at once he´d hear his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its reverberance along the walls and ceiling, feel ears growing tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who couldn´t find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like `protest, massaction, united working-class of this country and the world, revolution´, would light up the eyes and faces under him like the glare of a bonfire.

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets;

Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue. . . . Ladies screamed and ran in all directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake crawled out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to cross the sidewalk. . . . " "Some fish story. . . . " "That aint nothin," said an old man. "When I was a boy we used to go snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats.

No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He's a useless fardel on society.... The artist is a fardel.

What good? I'll bury them back there in the court and wait. I'll need them in the end. D'you know what it'll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there's a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That's what the world's like." "But they won't be worth anything. It'll only be work that is worth anything." "We'll see," said the Chink.

Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real.

Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new particular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?

Think of what it was they were applauding," he said at last. "My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.

With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation

in this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.

While his bread remains sweet, his novels may be as bitter as he likes.

El infierno, en realidad, es un poderoso estimulante