The Jungle: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Upton Sinclair

He told them cruel stories of people who had been done to death in this ‘buying a home’ swindle. They would be almost sure to get into a tight place and lose all their money; and there was no end of expense that one could never foresee, and the house might be good-for-nothing from top to bottom—how was a poor man to know? Then, too, they would swindle you with the contract—and how was a poor man to understand anything about a contract? It was all nothing but robbery, and there was no safety but in keeping out of it. And pay rent? asked Jurgis. Ah, yes, to be sure, the other answered, that too was robbery. It was all robbery, for a poor man.

The American Dream is nothing but a false dream.

The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best out of him—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away!

the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping.

He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, had made himself a slave.

The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair. So wrote a poet, to whom the world had dealt its justice: I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong…. And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man Ever should look upon!

(Jurgis was beginning to think for himself nowadays.)

The turning point that defines Jurgis' self growth

‘How did he die?’ ‘Rats killed him,’ she answered. Jurgis gave a gasp. ‘Rats killed him!’

I have known what it is to dare and to aspire, to dream mighty dreams and to see them perish—to see all the fair flowers of my spirit trampled into the mire by the wild-beast powers of life.

‘What,’ asks the prophet, ‘is the murder of them that kill the body to the murder of them that kill the soul?’