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The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
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Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
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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.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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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.
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Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.
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In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
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Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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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.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
Sinclair Lewis
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated.... No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work -- or want to work -- will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
Sinclair Lewis
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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
Sinclair Lewis