In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
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.
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Do you think it’s so snobbish, to want to see something besides one’s fellow citizens abroad?
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
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.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.