John Dos Passos Quotes - Page 3

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• Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.

  John Dos Passos

  Eye, Dull, May

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.

  John Dos Passos

  Memories, Leaving, Mind

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

  John Dos Passos

  Character, Novelists, Records

  "The Business of a Novelist". review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934.

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• Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.

  John Dos Passos

  Time, Spirit, Eating

  John Dos Passos (2013). “The 42nd Parallel”, p.220, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

  John Dos Passos

  Imagination, Mind, Great Work

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.

  John Dos Passos

  Past, Events, High Standards

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• Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.

  John Dos Passos

  Country, Pigs, Immigration

  John Dos Passos (2003). “Manhattan Transfer: A Novel”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

  John Dos Passos

  Ice Cream, People, Intellectual

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• Curiosity urges you on-driving force.

  John Dos Passos

  Curiosity, Driving, Force

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• It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.

  John Dos Passos

  Attitude, Party, Believe

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• Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.

  John Dos Passos

  Optimistic, Heart, Men

  Interview on February 03, 1964. "Talks With Authors". Book edited by Charles F. Madden, 1968.

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• 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

  Mistake, Years, Fifty

  Discussion session with students at Union College on October 16, 1968. "John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose". Book edited by Donald Pizer, 1988.

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• It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

  John Dos Passos

  Rams, Fiction, Way

  John Dos Passos (2015). “The Best Times: An Informal Memoir”, p.222, Open Road Media

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• Isn't it curious how completely ignorant we all are of the most important part of our bodily mechanism. It is really criminal. Yet there is no nation in the world that doesnt surround sex with fantastic walls. Of course ours are sillier than any-but not much.

  John Dos Passos

  Sex, Wall, Ignorant

  John Dos Passos (1973). “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos”, Harvard Common Press

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• Women alone always order sole. It means something.

  John Dos Passos

  Food, Mean, Order

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

  John Dos Passos

  Men, Ideas, Political

  John Dos Passos (2013). “1919: Volume Two of the U.S.A. Trilogy”, p.101, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Creativity, Adventure

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• Sex is a slotmachine.

  John Dos Passos

  Sex

  John Dos Passos (2013). “1919: Volume Two of the U.S.A. Trilogy”, p.151, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.

  John Dos Passos

  Beautiful, Freedom, People

  John Dos Passos (1921). “Three Soldiers”, p.327

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• It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you

  John Dos Passos

  Army, Giving, Joy

  John Dos Passos (1921). “Three Soldiers”, p.321

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• I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum . . . .I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours . . . instillers of stodginess.

  John Dos Passos

  Stupid, College, Thinking

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• Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.

  John Dos Passos

  Literature, Renaissance, London

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• Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

  John Dos Passos

  Revolutionary, Hell, Poet

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.

  John Dos Passos

  Kids, Moon, Hands

  John Dos Passos (1934). “Three Plays: The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc., Fortune Heights”

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