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In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring if they don't fall out they let them live another year.
John Dos Passos
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John Dos Passos
Age: 74 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: September 28
Journalist
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
War Correspondent
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
John Roderigo Dos Passos
J. R. Dos Passos
Years
Trees
People
Spring
Tree
Guinea
Year
Savage
Fall
Tribes
Another
Savages
Certain
Shake
Live
Shakes
More quotes by John Dos Passos
I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.
John Dos Passos
We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos
The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves
John Dos Passos
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
John Dos Passos
It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?
John Dos Passos
There are too many creative writing courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.
John Dos Passos
If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos
Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
John Dos Passos
The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.
John Dos Passos
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos
In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.
John Dos Passos
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.
John Dos Passos
People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos Passos
People do not choose a career the career envelopes them.
John Dos Passos
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.
John Dos Passos
If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.
John Dos Passos
I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
John Dos Passos
But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.
John Dos Passos
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.
John Dos Passos
