John Dos Passos - Years Quotes

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The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.

John Dos Passos
For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle.

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
[Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.

John Dos Passos
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