Синклер Льюис цитаты страница 4

„Проблема этой страны в том, что слишком много людей говорят: «Проблема этой страны в том, что…»“

„Сначала вы требуете выпивку, потом выпивка требует выпивки, потом выпивка требует вас.“

„Я думаю, что, возможно, мы хотим более осознанной жизни.“

„Больше всего человек обижается, если ставят под сомнение его чувство юмора или же его право быть несчастливым.“

„Я люблю Америку, но она мне не нравится.“

„Мы бы заболели слишком большим количеством печенья, но еще больше - без печенья.“

„Это может быть делом сатаны, в которого Аарон с тревогой верил всем своим существом, за исключением, возможно, своего разума.“

„Уродливый лесной сарай, который там, прямо на земле, мне симпатичнее, чем десятиэтажный храм, которого там нет.“

“The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.”

Синклер Льюис: Цитаты на английском языке

“Aaron began to learn the Dakota language. Isaac, like a newly ordained Doctor of Philosophy, after years of being nagged into learning, rejoiced to be invited to stand up and look important and teach. He was astonished by his own erudition and by the fact that his class of one did not walk out.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative notes — in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them. ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 4”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 31

“Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925)

“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“The outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“The more the Dakota have to do with the white, the worse. The whites give him whiskey to get his furs and bimeby he don't want to trap so many furst but he want plenty more whiskey. The white traders take his girl, and all he get in swap is a disease. They take his land, and all he get is a leetle annuity so he don't do any work and starve slow. The Indian gets white man's gun an he is drunk and kill his own brother and they call him sinful. That's what he get from the white man—fine kettle, fine gun, fine blanket, the big pox, the small pox and religion.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Aaron had learned… from Mr. Fairlow's two-hour sermons on "The Jealousy of an Angry Jehovah Who Hath Weighed Sinners in the Balance and Found Them Wanting",… that God was a torturer who punished small boys for sins they might commit later.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 20

“Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 3

“He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

First lines
Elmer Gantry (1927)

“The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven…. Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good — kept him in touch with higher things.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 2

“"Even if some details of dogma aren't true—or even all of 'em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!"
"Are they? I wonder! Don't cheerful agnostics, who know they are going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they'll go to hell themselves. Consolation? No!"”

Sinclair Lewis книга Babbitt

~ Ch. 16
Babbitt (1922)

“It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“She did her work with the thoroughness of mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Everything seemed confused and contradictory, and he longed for one clear command from a divine martinet.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 18

“As they talked around the fire in the sitting-room, he was embarrassed by the nakedness of their piety.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 7

“It was of no use. That particular sort of coward and evader he was not, and he lay abed facing all his sins, all his slacknesses, and the merited punishment by a just and angry God.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 22

“Mostly the adult Indians did not wish their children to learn these arts from the emissaries of what they astonishingly considered an alien, false and hostile God.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 5

“He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.”

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 21

“I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”

Sinclair Lewis книга Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch 21

“So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they "had wives and families to support."”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“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.”

Sinclair Lewis книга It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything. It did not matter what he said, so long as he kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he bespelled his classes with long, involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as perfume advertisements.”

Sinclair Lewis книга The Job

The Job (1917)

“The dinner was the best style of women's-magazine art, whereby the salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible fried chicken resembled something else.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 8

“Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 12

“The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen.”

Letter declining the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith

“He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding each new intricate mechanism—metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine gun, oxyacetylene welder—he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase, and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical and initiated.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 1, First lines

“It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want—or what they are told they want—is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts.”

Sinclair Lewis книга Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6