John Dos Passos - Living Quotes

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Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

John Dos Passos

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul.... And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?

John Dos Passos

It's rather grisly, isn't it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

John Dos Passos

What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.

John Dos Passos