87 Quotes by Theodore Dreiser

The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation.

You walk into a room, see a woman, and something happens. It’s chemical. What are you going to do about it?

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions – none more so than the most capable.

When waters engulf us we reach for a star.

Raw, glittering force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if it is to be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for the conventionally rooted. Your cautious citizen of average means, looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which the strong rise.

When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.

In short, he was one of those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and even larger phases of American natural development for their own aggrandizement.

And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must succeed. That’s what the world was made for. That’s what he was made for. That was what he would have to do.

She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.