Theodore Dreiser Quotes

The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation—to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

No, he must possess her if he could — to-day, quickly, as soon as possible. It was in that frame of mind that he returned to Mrs. Bracebridge’s home from his visit to Lorrie Street.

Would no one ever understand — or give him credit for his human — if all too human and perhaps wrong hungers — yet from which so many others — along with himself suffered?

you could no more see him in the light that you do than you could rise out of that box and fly through those windows.

Life's little ironies are not always manifest. We hear distant rumbling sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the reality.
(from W.L.S.)

And they were always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had rescued them from this or that predicament — never how they had rescued any one else.

In the light of the world's attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie's mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?

A real flame of love is a subtle thing. It burns as a will-o'-the-wisp, dancing onward to fairy lands of delight. It roars as a furnace. Too often jealousy is the quality upon which it feeds.

"What old illusion of hope is not here forever repeated! Says the soul of the toiler
to itself, "I shall soon be free. I shall be in the ways and the hosts of the merry. The
streets, the lamp, the lighted chamber set for dining are for me. The theatres, the halls,
the parties, the ways of rest and the paths of song — these are mine in the night." Though
all humanity be still enclosed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air. The
dullest feel something which they may not always express or describe. It is the lifting of
the burden of toil."

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

The clear proof of one overt deed was the cold breath needed to convert the lowering clouds of suspicion into a rain of wrath.

...the past was so painful at any point. It seared and burned.

To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar health is invariably fascinating. Next to love, it is the one thing which solaces and delights.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

It was that old mass yearning for a likeness in all things that troubled them, and him.