Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1920)

24 Sourced Quotes

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There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Sinclair Lewis
She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.

Sinclair Lewis
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.

Sinclair Lewis
What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

Sinclair Lewis
It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

Sinclair Lewis
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Sinclair Lewis
There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid'.

Sinclair Lewis
Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions. Yes, I've heard that plea.... To word it differently, 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you must live up to it!'

Sinclair Lewis
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
The outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all.

Sinclair Lewis
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

Sinclair Lewis
The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

Sinclair Lewis
"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
I went to a denominational college and learned that 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.

Sinclair Lewis
She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.

Sinclair Lewis
Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure—wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Sinclair Lewis
Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch.

Sinclair Lewis
Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself.

Sinclair Lewis
A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.

Sinclair Lewis
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

Sinclair Lewis
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

Sinclair Lewis
She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

Sinclair Lewis
There had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!

Sinclair Lewis
I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now— and we're going to try our hands at it.

Sinclair Lewis