Sinclair Lewis Quotes

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

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.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.

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.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

People will buy anything that's one to a customer.

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.

I was feeling rational and restless, which is horrible for watching movies

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth...

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.

Oh, quit it! You're the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.

The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound." - Carol Kennicott

Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?