The Gospel of the army is cunning, as of all other human activities. The wisdom of the snake under the meekness of the sheep is what wins out. John Dos Passos More Quotes by John Dos Passos More Quotes From John Dos Passos The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers. John Dos Passos ice-cream pie men Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension. John Dos Passos intense apathy complicated Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play. John Dos Passos optimism play men It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you John Dos Passos army joy giving I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps. John Dos Passos dawn Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out. John Dos Passos tired coffee art It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general withtheir vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium. John Dos Passos power struggle men I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't. John Dos Passos six writing firsts Letters are largely written to get things out of your system. John Dos Passos written letters We're headed for collapse, if you want my opinion, Missy. I can see it in the fallin' off of the quality of vagrants. There was atime you could find real good company in almost any jungle you'd pick, men who could talk, men who'd read a book now and then; and now, what do you find, a lot of dirty little guttersnipes no decent tramp would want to associate with. John Dos Passos real book dirty But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people. John Dos Passos freedom beautiful people Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older. John Dos Passos being-alone break-up change There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel. John Dos Passos novelists writing character Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit. John Dos Passos eating spirit time The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can. John Dos Passos writing book reality The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history. John Dos Passos records novelists character One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass. John Dos Passos leaving mind memories Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of. John Dos Passos hell poet revolutionary A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey. John Dos Passos journey self men The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk. John Dos Passos sister air beach
