Dodsworth Quotes

“If travel were so inspiring and informing a business...then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Why, she said, with a smile which snapped back after using as abruptly as a stretched rubber band, didn't he take a nice walk?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a cafe till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“he could not imagine an American who was not a collector of sights, who did not work at travel as though it were a tournament with the honors to the person who could last out the largest number of museums. He was as convinced that all Americans mark down credits for themselves in their Baedekers as are Americans that all Germans drink beer every evening.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage- scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“He noted that most of the men of the country club set, including himself, drank too much. And they talked too much about drinking too much. Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze. They were jumpy about it, and as fascinated as a schoolboy peering at obscene posters.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“He had been everywhere, and he could make everywhere sound uninteresting.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“They never learned whether she was in trade, living on alimony, or possessed of a family income. Sam suspected that she was an international spy. She was a pleasant woman, and very clever. She talked about herself constantly, and never told anything whatever about herself”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“So far as I can see," he brooded, "travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you're going to be respectable.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the Paris editions”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Fran had read enough about art; she glanced over the studio magazines monthly, and she knew every gallery on Fifth Avenue. But, to her, painting, like all "culture," was interesting only as it adorned her socially. In story-books parroting the Mark Twain tradition, the American wife still marches her husband to galleries from which he tries to sneak away; but in reality Sam's imagination was far more electrified by blue snow and golden shoulders and dynamic triangles than was Fran's. Probably he would have balked at the blurs of Impressionism and the jazz mathematics of Cubism,”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“where DO you suppose such Americans come from! In fact, I'm quite sure you could both be mistaken for English, if you merely lived here a few years. So it's a quite impersonal question. But don't you feel, as we do, that for all our admiration of American energy and mechanical ingenuity, it's the most terrible country the world has ever seen? Such voices--like brass horns! Such rudeness! Such lack of reticence! And such material ideals! And the standardization--every one thinking exactly alike about everything. I give you my word that you'll be so glad you've deserted your ghastly country that after two years here, you'll never want to go home. Don't you already feel that a bit?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Always she had a genius for keeping herself superior to him by just the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle- pointed comparison of him with defter men.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“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 himself for having begun the Europeanization which he wasn't going to begin.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Do you know, I had a feeling of leisure in France and in England. I felt there as though people made their jobs work for them; they didn’t give up their lives to working for their jobs.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis: A Tale of Marriage, Midlife Crisis, and Self-Discovery

“The European, the aristocrat, feels that he is responsible to past generations to carry on the culture they have formed. He feels that graciousness, agreeable manners, loyalty to his own people, are more important”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“An American thinks of a good cook as a low person; a European respects him as an artist.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Paris, that feminine and flirtatious refuge from reality.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“They were not altogether to blame. They were the products of Prohibition, mass production, and an education dominated by the beliefs that one goes to college to become acquainted with people who will later be useful in business, and that the greatness of a university is in ratio to the number of its students and the number of its athletic victories.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Sam was so pleased that he asked the man to lunch, and telephoned to him often, to the end that the man, who had regarded Sam as one of his gods, saw that he was merely a solitary and common human being, and despised him and was uninterested.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Well--" philosophized Matey. "Eh? Heavens no, I don't want to dance in this stock exchange! Well, I might just as well PRETEND I don't mind Tub's chasing after all these little goldfish, because he'll do it anyway, and I might as well get the credit for being broad-minded. Which I ain't!”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“In fact, every American that Dickens shows in the book is a homicidal idiot, except one--and he wanted to live abroad! Well! You can't tell me that a degenerate bunch like that could have taken the very river- bottom swamps that Dickens describes, and in three generations have turned 'em into the prosperous cement-paved powerful country that they are today! Yet Europe goes on reading hack authors who still steal their ideas from 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and saying, 'There, I told you so!' Say, do you realize that at the time Dickens described the Middlewest--my own part of the country--as entirely composed of human wet rags, a fellow named Abe Lincoln and another named Grant were living there; and not more than maybe ten years later, a boy called William Dean Howells (I heard him lecture once at Yale, and I notice that they still read his book about Venice IN Venice) had been born? Dickens couldn't find or see people like that. Perhaps some European observers today are missing a few Lincolns and Howellses!”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

“Here a few weeks back, when we were in Vienna, I picked up 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and waded through it. Funny, mind you, his picture of America a hundred years ago. But he shows a bunch of people along the Ohio River and in New York who were too lazy to scratch, who--”
― Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth