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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.

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
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Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
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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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His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
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What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
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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
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You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Sinclair Lewis
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called patriotism and love of sport.
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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
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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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We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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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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To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No it is something dead.
Sinclair Lewis
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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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When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
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Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
Sinclair Lewis