Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

Why had he ever gone abroad? It had unsettled him. He had been bored in Paris, yet he liked crepes Susette better than flapjacks; he liked leaning over the bridges of the Seine better than walking on Sixth Avenue; and he couldn't, just now, be very excited about the new fenders for the Revelation car. How was it that this America, which had been so surely and comfortably in his hand, had slipped away?

The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army.

How many millions of American husbands had sat on the edges of how many millions of hotel beds, from San Francisco to Stockholm, sighing to the unsympathetic telephone, Oh, not in? ruffling through the telephone book, and again sighing, Oh, not in?-- looking for playmates for their handsome wives, while the wives listened blandly and never once cried, But I don't want any one else! Aren't we two enough?

Emily and Harry McKee made Sam blush by the cheery openness with which they informed him that they intended to have only three children, but to have those with celerity and to have them perfect. (They apparently possessed more control of Providence than was understood by such an innocent as Sam.)

Not one of them had found life quite the amusing and triumphant adventure he had expected; and they came back wistfully, longing to recapture their credulous golden days. They believed (for a week) that their classmates were peculiarly set apart from the crooked and exasperating race of men as a whole.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.

he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

He reflected that Fran had an unsurpassed show-window display but not much on the shelves inside.

It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn't much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children. What was it all about? What did he want?

He held her lightly enough and, after the chaste custom of the era, his hands were gloved. But his finger- tips felt a current from her body. He knew that she was the most exquisite child in the world; he knew that he was going to marry her and keep her forever in a shrine; he knew that after years of puzzled wonder about the purpose of life, he had found it.

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.

the youngsters in canoes were now singing My Old Kentucky Home. Zenith was still in the halcyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the duty of young people to be hard and brisk, and knowing about radios, jazz, and gin.

But she wasn't thinking Yes. She was thinking, Milt, what worries me now isn't how I can risk letting the 'nice people' meet you. It's how I can ever waste you on the 'nice people.

She looked up at columns of crimson and saffron and burning brown, up at the matronly falls, up at lone pines clinging to jutting rocks that must be already crashing toward her, and in the splendor she knew the Panic fear that is the deepest reaction to beauty.

She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.

Now of all the cosmic problems yet unsolved, not cancer nor the future of poverty are the flustering questions, but these twain: Which is worse, not to wear evening clothes at a party at which you find every one else dressed, or to come in evening clothes to a house where, it proves, they are never worn? And: Which is worse, not to tip when a tip has been expected; or to tip, when the tip is an insult?

But I wonder about Chapter Twenty. Will there be the deuce to play? . . . Just because life is more easy and human here, I feel more out of it.

He liked Ross Ireland; he found particularly amusing, very like his own cultural pretenses, the fact that since Ireland was totally unable to learn any language save Iowan, he thundered that English was enough to take anybody anywhere and that these fellows that talk about your having to know French if you're going to do political stuff in Europe are just trying to show what smart guys they are.

She was used to gracious leisure, attractive uselessness, nut-center chocolates, and a certain wonder as to why she was alive.

These folks from New York are all so high and mighty, with their skyscrapers and banquets and everything that t if we don't guess they come from there when we first lay an eye on 'em, we just show ourselves as awful rubes. Oh, yes! Yes. You can always tell 'em by their touch-me-not ways.

As he watched her sleeping, under wretched and insufficient blankets, in the cold nights which swooped down after the panting sun-drenched days, his dry heart blossomed in tenderness. . . . To think that he had once esteemed people because they understood Goossens's music or James Joyce's fiction, because they wore sleek clothes and were clever at the use of forks, because they could set up wooden words as a barricade against roaring life!

He would certainly (so the observer assumed) produce excellent motor cars; he would make impressive speeches to the salesmen; but he would never love passionately, lose tragically, nor sit in contented idleness upon tropic shores.

He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered.