154 Quotes by John Dos Passos

When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody’s embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.

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

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.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain’t pinned down they’re hell.

There’s a rattle of chains and a clatter from the donkeyengine where a tall man in blue overalls stands at a lever in the middle of a cloud of steam that wraps round your face like a wet towel.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven’t even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.