Theodore Dreiser Quotes

"It was given unto you to know the Peace of God," he insisted, quoting Paul and thereafter sentences from Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, on how easy it was — if Clyde would but repeat and pray as he had asked him to — for him to know and delight in the "peace that passeth all understanding."

course. For in some blind, dualistic way both she and Asa insisted, as do all religionists, in disassociating God from harm and error and misery, while granting Him nevertheless supreme control. They would seek for something else — some malign, treacherous, deceiving power which, in the face of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, still beguiles and betrays — and find it eventually in the error and perverseness of the human heart, which God has made, yet which He does not control, because He does not want to control it.

One of his self–imposed tasks was to go about the house after Lester, or the servants, turning out the gas–jets or electric–light bulbs which might accidentally have been left burning. That was a sinful extravagance.

Значение внешних и внутренних перемен, которые порою совершаются в нашей жизни, не всегда сразу нам ясно. Мы потрясены, испуганы - а потом как будто возвращаемся к прежнему существованию, но перемена уже совершилась. Никогда и нигде мы уже не будем прежними.

Cowperwood was shocked by the nudity of the Venus which conveyed an atmosphere of European freedom not common to America;

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

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.

"So they decided against me. Now I will have to go through that door after all, — like all those others. They'll draw the curtains for me, too. Into that other room — then back across the passage — saying good-bye as I go, like those others. I will not be here any more." He seemed to be going over each step in his mind — each step with which he was so familiar, only now, for the first time, he was living it for himself.

"Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding."

It is an exceptional thing to find beauty, youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of view — softened and charmingly emotionalized — in another.

She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom! Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

"You felt no sorrow? No shame? Then?" "Yes, shame, maybe. Maybe sorrow, too, a little. I knew it was terrible. I felt that it was, of course. But still — you see — " "Yes, I know. That Miss X. You wanted to get away." "Yes — but mostly I was frightened, and I didn't want to help her." "Yes! Yes! Tst! Tst! Tst! If she drowned you could go to that Miss X. You thought of that?" The Reverend McMillan's lips were tightly and sadly compressed. "Yes." "My son! My son! In your heart was murder then."

All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?

Shakespeare, I come!