There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.
John Dos PassosThe 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 PassosI think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum . . . .I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours . . . instillers of stodginess.
John Dos PassosTo fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.
John Dos PassosI dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour's talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.
John Dos Passos