Sinclair Lewis: Trending quotes

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Sinclair Lewis: 272 quotes3 likes

“You have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting. ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925)

“It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three of four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“All of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 34

“The doctor asserted, 'Sure religion is a fine influence—got to have it to keep the lower classes in order—fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of these fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O. K.; lot of wise old coots figured it out, and they knew more about it than we do.' He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it; he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with the Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as 'washed in the blood of the lamb' and 'a vengeful God…' then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism—without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers a felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, 'My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,' then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Aaron was uncomfortable and a little afraid. This, he thought, is how God might pray to his God.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 1

“"I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Men of measured merriment! 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, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles!”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 25

“The trouble with this country is… that there're too many people going about saying "The trouble with this country is—"”

Sinclair Lewis book Dodsworth

Dodsworth, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=_nL1PGgdVDIC&q=%22The+trouble+with+this+country+is%22+%22that+there're+too+many+people+going+about+saying%22&pg=PA82#v=onepage (1929)

“He heard them whispering—whispering… The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men's cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 32

“To one who had never made more than five thousand a year himself, it was inspiring to explain before dozens of popeyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand—fifty thousand—a million a year, and all this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“He had unhappily noticed at the mission that when he had most hotly prayed, it had been a way of escaping a decision, of frivolously passing the lot to God.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 50

“She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“His central characters are the pioneer, the doctor, the scientist, the businessman, and the feminist. The appeal of his best fiction lies in the opposition between his idealistic protagonists and an array of fools, charlatans, and scoundrels - evangelists, editorialists, pseudo-artists, cultists, and boosters.”

Martin Light in The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis (1975)

“What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith.”

Dorothy Thompson, his ex-wife, in "The Boy From Sauk Center" in The Atlantic (November 1960)

“I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.”

George Bernard Shaw on Sinclair Lewis receiving the Nobel Prize (1930)

“Sinclair Lewis was a crypto-sentimentalist and a slovenly writer who managed a slight falsification of life in order to move the reader.”

James Gould Cozzens, "Books: The Hermit of Lambertville", Time, 2 September 1957