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b5ad2f9
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flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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5b07d53
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All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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2aacbce
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He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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04d8c1d
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Say, I swear the best Messiah in the whole show is this darky, Father Divine.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9a5eddd
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I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?
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Sinclair Lewis |
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d8038dd
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Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3f45c09
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We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a6d2b9d
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I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a3d65c3
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After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was sudden..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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837d170
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Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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b40ac48
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he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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3f34f69
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The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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e68c552
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Brother Males and Shemales: Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it's going to be Practical. We'll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2)home wid us. Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A.,..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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be25e98
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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0b0f163
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On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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e0fc141
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And, swearing that he'd let no English passers-by tell him what HE was going to wear, he stalked toward Piccadilly and into a hat-shop he remembered having seen. He'd just glance in there. Certainly they couldn't SELL him anything! English people couldn't sell like Americans! So he entered the shop and came out with a new gray felt hat for town, a new brown one for the country, a bowler, a silk evening hat, and a cap, and he was proud of hi..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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8df98c2
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lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no
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Sinclair Lewis |
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d8ec31b
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But it was indecent, it was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on the charge that they had told irreverent stories about him.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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b36f053
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Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.
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church-architecture
predestination
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Sinclair Lewis |
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52b8f56
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Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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bdeac0e
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She continued it to Hugh, 'Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?' 'What?' flatly. 'We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white an green house filled with books and silver tea-sets.' 'And cookies?' 'Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and po..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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e0b4bee
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Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred
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Sinclair Lewis |
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2123a8c
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in a world of groceries and sermons
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Sinclair Lewis |
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27227e3
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breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed ..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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cc718df
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the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center , but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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9880281
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She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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2722c08
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Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4ba0d8e
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What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves!
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Sinclair Lewis |
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0c01b6f
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Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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b8c91aa
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She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4f03f2e
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bouncing old retired general--he's dotty over motors. Roars around on a shocking old motor bike--mustache and dignity flying in the morning breeze--atrocious bills for all the geese and curates he runs over.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6380c5d
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In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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bba6f1d
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And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg "Do you mind if I run up to bed now--such a headache," with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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63f5fb8
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He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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945527f
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that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups?
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4eb16cf
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What'd you like me to buy you, Nan? Some pearls or--" She stopped before him, planted her arms akimbo, and spoke furiously. "I am not vot you call a gold-digger! I am not lady enough! If when you get tired of me, you vant to give me a hundred dollars--or fifty--fine. But you must, by God, understand, when Nande Azeredo takes a man, it iss because she likes him! Pearls? What would I do with pearls? Can I eat pearls?"
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Sinclair Lewis |
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4502c76
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No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was taken by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in his state, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason's genesis was and remained a mystery.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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11a9f6a
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that useful Patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack, the government immediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable "incidents" on the Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico as soon as America showed that it was getting hot and patriotic enough."
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Sinclair Lewis |
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d87fe9b
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Honestly, I think that the sense of humor of the people that TALK about having a 'sense of humor' is a worse vice than drinking.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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a8910c9
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In some respects, writing was his only form of human interaction.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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5a28ce0
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The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a somewhat confusing organization--as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the pr..
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Sinclair Lewis |
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f4d1eca
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freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate the rights of the Mob.
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6aafa90
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Even Europe joined in. With the most modest friendliness, explaining that they wished not to intrude on American domestic politics but only to express personal admiration for that great Western advocate of peace and prosperity, Berzelius Windrip, there came representatives of certain foreign powers, lecturing throughout the land: General Balbo, so popular here because of his leadership of the flight from Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholar ..
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american-politics
collusion
europe
politics
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Sinclair Lewis |
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6a5ac9b
|
Pictures? Why talk stupidly about pictures when he could talk intelligently about engines? Languages? If he had nothing to say, what was the good of saying it in three languages? Manners? These presumable dukes and dignitaries whom he was passing on Pall Mall might be able to enter a throne-room more loftily, but he didn't want to enter a throne-room.
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Sinclair Lewis |