Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

Sam was so pleased that he asked the man to lunch, and telephoned to him often, to the end that the man, who had regarded Sam as one of his gods, saw that he was merely a solitary and common human being, and despised him and was uninterested.

Mrs. Spinney had red hair and alimony;

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes--since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a year.

Do you know, I had a feeling of leisure in France and in England. I felt there as though people made their jobs work for them; they didn't give up their lives to working for their jobs.

They were not altogether to blame. They were the products of Prohibition, mass production, and an education dominated by the beliefs that one goes to college to become acquainted with people who will later be useful in business, and that the greatness of a university is in ratio to the number of its students and the number of its athletic victories.

Do you suppose it's dangerous? she asked her father, who said a lot of comforting things that didn't mean anything.

Lewis's first novel appeared in November 1912 under the pseudonym of Tom Graham, because Lewis regarded it as a pot boiler, which was written quickly to pay the bills rather than for any artistic endeavour. It had an initial print run of 1,000 copies and sold less than 800 of those. Lewis later revealed that it was written "on a wharf in Provincetown, Mass. on a vacation from my bosses".

Intellectually, I know America is no better than any other country. Emotionally, I know she is better than every other country.

An American thinks of a good cook as a low person; a European respects him as an artist.

The European, the aristocrat, feels that he is responsible to past generations to carry on the culture they have formed. He feels that graciousness, agreeable manners, loyalty to his own people, are more important

But with rising stubbornness he asserted that if he had to take the arts as something in which he must pass an examination, he would chuck them altogether and be content with poker.

she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them . . .

There were massed about the table, screaming, some thirty people. Sam never remembered any of them, save Endicott Everett Atkins. The rest seemed to him as indistinguishable as separate mosquitoes in a swarm, and rather noisier. But there was nothing noisy about Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins.

He had, for a few days, forgotten that wherever he traveled, he must take his own familiar self along, and that that self would loom up between him and new skies, however rosy. It was a good self. He liked it, for he had worked with it. Perhaps it could learn things. But would it learn any more here, where it was chilled by the unfamiliarity, than in his quiet library, in solitary walks, in honestly auditing his life, back in Zenith?

He wandered to the window. In that blast of snow, the shaft of the Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty gray stories, with unbroken vertical lines swooping up beyond his vision into the snowy fog. It had nobility, but it seemed cruel, as lone and contemptuous of friendly human efforts as a forgotten tower on the Siberian steppes. How indifferently it would watch him starve and freeze!

he could not imagine an American who was not a collector of sights, who did not work at travel as though it were a tournament with the honors to the person who could last out the largest number of museums. He was as convinced that all Americans mark down credits for themselves in their Baedekers as are Americans that all Germans drink beer every evening.

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.

and every one desired to know of him only two things: Was this his first visit to England? and How long would he stay? And they didn't seem to care so very much about either. He wondered how many times he himself had asked foreign visitors to the Revelation plant--Britishers, Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen-- whether this was their first visit to America, and How long did they plan to stay?

I do not! Sam was suddenly and thoroughly angry; suddenly free of whatever diffidence he had before this formal society. I never was much of a flag-waver. I don't suppose America is perfect, not by a long shot. I know we have plenty of fools and scoundrels, and I don't mind roasting them. But if you'll excuse me for differing with you-

I am reluctantly considering the Academy (American Academy of Arts and Letters) because it is so perfect an example of the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality.

Sam came to take its somber vastness as natural; felt the million histories being enacted behind the curtained windows of the million houses. On clear days, when rare thin sunshine caressed the gray-green bricks which composed the backs of London houses, even these ugly walls had for him, in relief at the passing of the mist-pall, a charm he had never found in the hoydenish glare of sunshine on bright winter days in Zenith.

Well-- philosophized Matey. Eh? Heavens no, I don't want to dance in this stock exchange! Well, I might just as well PRETEND I don't mind Tub's chasing after all these little goldfish, because he'll do it anyway, and I might as well get the credit for being broad-minded. Which I ain't!

It was Sheila who six months ago had demanded the Hispano-Suiza, but this summer she was in a socialist stage. Sam was a little annoyed because all through dinner she kept asking why the workers should not take from Sam and her father all their wealth.

It had become a disease with both nations, he reflected, this discussion of Britain vs. America; this incessant, irritated, family scolding. Of course back in the cornfields of the Middlewest, people didn't often discuss it, nor did the villagers on the Yorkshire moors, nor Cornish fishermen. But the people who traveled and met their cousins of the other nation, the people who fed on newspapers on either side the water, they were all obsessed.