Sinclair Lewis

"Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up. ~ Ch. 3"

"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! ~ Ch. 3"

"It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind. ~ Ch. 4"

"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. ~ Ch. 5"

"Deacon Uriel Gadd was a man of integrity, granite-rough and lichen-coated. The punishment in his rheumatism, clearly sent of God, and the defection of his son Elijah, had weakened him only in making him somewhat less contemptuous of his sentimental son Aaron. All other persons he divided into fools, scoundrels and the blessedly elect, with only himself indisputably in the last class. ~ Ch. 6"

"Hours then of blasphemy and fury and debate, all in the theological terms that seem shocking to the literate citizens today, who believe in God but just don't care to mention him or any of the other lowly friends they knew before they went to Yale. ~ Ch. 6"

"Everything seemed confused and contradictory, and he longed for one clear command from a divine martinet. ~ Ch. 7"

"Maybe he was not a good-enough Christian to get the proper zest out of mortifying his indolent flesh. ~ Ch. 15"

"Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working. ~ Ch. 17"

"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. ~ Ch. 20"

"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. ~ Ch. 21"

"As they talked around the fire in the sitting-room, he was embarrassed by the nakedness of their piety. ~ Ch. 22"

"When he gets uppity about his supposed learning, I just take it on myself to remind him that God and his angels know almost as much as college professors ~ Ch. 23"

"He prayed, 'Lord God, let us be the kind of Christians that you would be if you were a Christian'. ~ Ch. 24"

"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. ~ Ch. 31"

"He fretted that he did not know anything. He sighed, 'I have sought the Kingdom of God a little, the Squire has sought it terribly, but we haven't even a map, and after what I saw this afternoon, I know the Sioux are as barbarous as we are. 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? ~ Ch. 33"

"Indians, of course, have no 'theology,' and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures. ~ Ch. 41"

"We should adopt Jesus boldly, and send missionaries to explain him to the whites, except that no Indian except one very old and sick and never much good in warfare would be pompous enough to tell alien peoples what he thinks they should believe. ~ Ch. 41"

"He had unhappily noticed at the mission that when he had most hotly prayed, it had been a way of escaping a decision, of frivolously passing the lot to God. ~ Ch. 50"

"I've sat at the preachers' feet and listened to them, faithfully, and tried to make myself become what they said I ought to be. I'm through! I do my own thinking now and my own bossing. ~ Ch. 51"

"It did seem sounder to build houses which he could build than to teach children a gospel which he did not altogether understand in a Sioux language which he could not quite speak. He reflected, 'If I could put over some kind of equality for Mark Shadrock and Black Wolf, that would be enough heavenly progress for me.' ~ Ch. 53"

"I don't believe in fear of divine vengeance, and I do believe in justice and equality.... ~ Ch. 57"

"An ugly woodshed that's there, right on the ground, is handsomer to me than a ten-story temple that isn't there. ~ Ch. 57"

"I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence. ~ Ch. 59"

"Sinclair Lewis was a crypto-sentimentalist and a slovenly writer who managed a slight falsification of life in order to move the reader."

"Sinclair Lewis knew about the crazed feeling that you get when people think you’re a pleasant person. You get all this praise for your good behavior but inside you’re seething."

"His central characters are the pioneer, the doctor, the scientist, the businessman, and the feminist. The appeal of his best fiction lies in the opposition between his idealistic protagonists and an array of fools, charlatans, and scoundrels - evangelists, editorialists, pseudo-artists, cultists, and boosters."

"I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot."

"What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith."

"While I have never been of the majority that considers the Sinclair Lewis of Main Street and Babbitt a major novelist, I feel sad to report of Gideon Planish that I found it unimportant, sloppy, even dull. There is something endearing about Mr. Lewis as a writer that checks an entirely objective estimate of his recent work-perhaps his boyish idealism of which he is so boyishly ashamed, or the fact that his fictional creations seem so clearly to be aspects of his own many-faceted personality that one feels that to turn on him is to take unfair advantage of what he has been naïve enough to tell us about himself."

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."