299 Quotes by Sinclair Lewis

Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.

But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops.

She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day.

I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix?

I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute.

I’m not a humming-bird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.

So kindly,” Carol mused, “so well meant, so neighborly – and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.

Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.