Your writer, your scientist, your chief official, all have lost the power to revive the early illusion concerning fame and high place. Their beauty and delight is like the mirage in the heavens, only plain to the eye outside; within is nothing.
Theodore DreiserWe are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.
Theodore DreiserIf I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circustance.
Theodore DreiserIt isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation...all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control.
Theodore DreiserThe thing that impressed me then as now about New Yorkโฆ was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorantโฆ the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
Theodore Dreiser