QUOTES

  • “A great satirist can turn disgust into violent explosive beauty”

    –John Dos Passos, The Fourteen Chronicle

  • “We’ve been cruising around West Texas—very blood heating country hot as hinges of hell in fact but damn fine place to live—nothing is more encouraging than traveling round the U.S.”

    –John Dos Passos, Letter to Stewart Mitchell, April 1939, The Fourteenth Chronicle

  • “Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.”

    –John Dos Passos, acceptance speech, Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1957

  • “I suffer from a multiplicity of desires. I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.”

    –John Dos Passos, Letter to Rumsey Marvin, December 29th, 1918

  • “Life is too gorgeous to waste a second of it in drabness or open-mouthed stupidity. One must work and riot and throw oneself into the whirl. Boredom and denseness are the two unforgivable sins. We’ll have plenty of time to be bored when the little white worms crawl about our bones in the crescent putrifying earth. While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket.”

    –John Dos Passos, Letter to Rumsey Marvin, December 29th, 1918

  • “A chill of half delicious fright still goes down my back when I remember a hound baying around our camp one night. We had been reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. He was circling, coming closer and closer. We were in a cold sweat but we went to sleep in spite of the hound and daylight came with the early mosquitoes and no harm was done. Even then the Quinnipiac seemed to others a pretty sordid little stream smelling of whale oil soap from the silver factories up around Meriden, but for us it was the Amazon.”

    —John Dos Passos reminisces about his time at The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, from Virginia Spencer Carr’s John Dos Passos: A Life.

  • “Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment.”

    —John Dos Passos, acceptance speech, Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1957

  • “The chief asset of Brazil is the Brazilians.”

    –John Dos Passos, Brazil on the Move

  • “When people ask me why I keep wanting to go to Brazil, part of the answer is that it’s because the country is so vast and so raw and sometimes so monstrously beautiful; but it’s mostly because I find it easy to get along with the people.”

    —John Dos Passos, Brazil on the Move

  • “Imperial Rome! Conqueror of the world! Enlightener of the ages! We are within thine ancient walls! From the Imperial City to the Royal Princess love and greeting I will write to Her sublime, serene and celestial majesty tomorrow. With love from her.”

    —John Dos Passos, postcard to his mother from Rome, 1911, The Fourteenth Chronicle

  • "Once you fall in love with Italy, there’s no cure. You always have the Grand Canal in the back of your brain, and Vesuvius always smokes from its purple cone somewhere inside you.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1915, page 24

  • [Of Boston, Massachusetts] “Particularly Saturday night, there’s a wonderful atmosphere of gaiety and a sort of paganism about which delights me. I mean in the cheaper parts of the city; those are the only parts of any city that are ever alive.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1916, page 39

  • [Of Westmoreland County, Virginia] “It’s a wonderful blowy day and the hollyhocks are nodding and bowing like tall ladies at a country dance—the poppies are all a-flutter and the lavender comes in puffs of gorgeous fragrance through the window.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Dudley Poore, 1916, page 43

  • “The main thing is to write what you see as simply as possible. No, not exactly, the main thing is to keep the proper average between the music of the thing, the meter and the words—and don’t be afraid of any word if it seems to fit.”New List Item

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1916, page 52

  • “The world’s so darned interesting in every conceivable aspect that it’s frightfully hard to shut your doors and windows and sit in the dark of your own intelligence and spin.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1916, page 54

  • “The wonderful thing about Spain, speaking of togas, is that it is a sort of temple of anachronisms. I’ve never been any where where you so felt the strata of civilization—Celt-Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and French have each passed through Spain and left something there—alive.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1916, Page 56-57

  • [Of World War I] “The whole condition is so hopeless. It seems as if all our energy—all this complicated civilization the European races have labored and murdered and cheated for during so many evolving centuries were frittering itself away in this senseless agony of destruction. Germany seems to me rather a symptom than the cause.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to George St. John, 1917, Page 72

  • [Of World War I] “Horror is so piled on horror that there can be no more. Despair gives place to delirious laughter.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Diary entry, 1917, Page 89

  • [Of World War I] “The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self-seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1917, Page 92

  • [Of World War I] “The war looks as if it would never end and the net of slavery to it grows tighter and tighter about all of us. If people could only realize the inanity of it—or if they had the courage to stop being dupes…I am convinced that it is through pure cowardice that the war continues. The only thing is has proved to me is the necessity of alcohol and tobacco to the human race.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1917, Page 99

  • “The only thing I don’t think you ought to do is let your studies interfere with your education—I mean reading. I found that school and college interfered most damnably—and all real education you get yourself anyway.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1918, Page 146

  • “About style—I think that reading people in order to get ‘style’ from them is rather soft-headed. Your style is like the color of your hair or the cut of your pants—half accident, half act of God—to take thought to change or improve it results usually in rank affection.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1918, Page 181

  • “The only way of getting the command of English needed to express ideas is by reading and reading a damn lot.”

    The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1918, Page 181

  • “One must work and riot and throw oneself into the whirl. Boredom and denseness are the two unforgivable sins. We’ll have plenty of time to be before when the little white worms crawl about our bones in the crescent putrifying earth. While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1918, Page 240

  • “I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Rumsey Marvin, 1918, Page 240

  • “Freedom of the press does not mean compromise. It means publishing what Tom, Dick, and Harry damn please and letting people lump it if they don’t like it.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Eugene F. Saxton, 1921, Page 307

  • “Literature is a dirty occupation. Wish to God my father had apprenticed me to a cobbler.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Robert Hillyer, 1921, Page 314

  • “Venice is a sort of high-falutin Coney island. Music in the morning, people feeding pigeons in front of St. Maslas’, spaghetti tenors yodling in barges on the Grand Canal—fine swimming and exhibition of legs of ladies of pleasure at the Lido, little boats chugging in every direction toodling and jingling, general bawdy brouhaha.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Thomas P. Cope, 1921, Page 314

  • “Tehran is a delightful town full of watercourses and huge trees and funny little pastry porticoes and great mud gates plastered with pictures of battles and Shahs in tilework of a rather evil yellow and green hue, overlooked by pink and yellow mountains and by the snow-ribbed peak of Damavand, where the dirvs crouch in the rocky hollows and cast malice out of the world.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Thomas P. Cope, 1921, Page 320

  • “Honesty Hem, I think that publication is the honestest and easiest method of getting rid of bum writing. Unpublished stuff just festers and you get to be like a horse that’s pistol shy or whatever you call it when they are wonderful horses but never can start a race.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Ernest Hemingway, 1927, Page 368

  • “The Russian language is no joke. Under the strain of trying to learn it I’ve forced all the Spanish and most everything else out of my head and have managed to learn enough to make myself almost completely misunderstood wherever I go.

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Dudley Poore, 1928, Page 389

  • [Of Key West, Florida] “Life is agreeable calm and gently colored with Bacardi—the swimming is magnificent and you catch all sorts of iris colored finnies on the adjacent reefs, you broil them, basting them with a substance known as Old Sour and eat mightily well. Apart from that there’s absolutely nothing to do, which is a blessing.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1929, Page 391

  • “Say about Hemingway—he has his hunting license in the fact that nobody living can handle the damn language like he can.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 1934, Page 456

  • “I’m now at last convinced that means can’t be disassociated from ends and that massacre only creates more massacre and oppression more oppression and means become ends.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1935, Page 462

  • [Of America] “The process of corruption of the country by the city is going on so fast. When everything is finally one big suburb I don’t suppose it’ll be so bad.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1936, Page 485

  • “The Marxist critics are just finding out, with considerable chagrin, that my stuff isn’t Marxist. I should think that anybody with half an eye would have noticed that in the first place.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to William H. Bond, 1938, Page 516

  • “There ought to be a series of medals struck off for people who refrain from writing about subjects they don’t understand—we wouldn’t need many.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Josephine Herbst, 1939, Page 524

  • [Of F. Scott Fitzgerald] “I was fond of him and had great respect and admiration for him. He died just at the wrong moment in his career. I am sure his next book would have been good. It was impossible for him to be anything but a writer.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1941, Page 533

  • “Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghostwriters and press agents so that it is getting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1951, Page 595

  • “There’s nothing new about working for the pleasure of it. That’s been the motivation of first class people from the beginning of time.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle Letter to Lucy Dos Passos, 1970, Page 639

  • [Of his father, John Randolph Dos Passos] “There was a happy defiance in the way the curled points of his mustaches bristled. They responded to his mood. The few times I saw them droop I felt sick with dismay.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 2

  • [His father, John Randolph Dos Passos] “was wont to say that the mind was like a big old trunk in the attic. Nothing you put in was ever lost. Often you couldn’t find things but eventually they turned up.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 14

  • “In the spring of 1917 some people caught socialism the way others caught the flu.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle, page 46

  • [Of E.E. Cummings] “He never pretended to be practical about practical matters. He thought a poet should be fed by the ravens, and of course he was.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle, page 85

  • “New York is at its best in October. The girls all look pretty in their new fall outfits. There’s a novel twist to the arrangements in the shop windows. The sky is very blue. The clouds are very white. Windows of tall buildings sparkle in the sun. Everything has the million dollar look.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle, page 127

  • “If Ulysses didn’t accomplish anything else—for me at least—it disposed of the current theory that the English novel was dead.” “College friendships bulk so large. The people involved are quite out of scale with the rest of the world. When one of those early friends dies your universe is irreparably diminished.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle, page 131

  • “When you are in your twenties it never occurs to you that you may live to be an old man.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 132

  • [E.E.] Cummings’ delight in certain things was contagious as a child’s. Christmas tree balls, stars, snowflakes. Elephants were his totem. I would never have enjoyed snow so much if I hadn’t walked around Washington Square with Cummings in a snowstorm. He loved mice. He had a great eye for sparrows and all pert timid bright-eyed creatures.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 135

  • “The last time I saw him the summer before he died was entertaining a tame chipmunk. We ate supper on the porch of his father’s old hilltop house in the woods above Silver Lake. The chipmunk kept popping through the vines and out onto the brick floor of the porch for peanuts. You couldn’t tell whether Cummings or the chipmunk enjoyed the little scene more. They had the same glint in their eyes. They both looked their best.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 135

  • [Of Ernest Hemingway] “When he was a young man he had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into. His knowledge of prizefighting and the police-blotter lingo picked up in Kansas City and Toronto gave him a direct vocabulary that pinned his stories down. Everything was in sharp focus.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 141

  • “Helping put your friends’ children to bed before going out to dinner with them is a feature of the society of recently grown-up Americans I’ve always enjoyed. Men aren’t ever quite so egotistical with women around. By the same token young men and women can’t put on many airs if they have brats to attend to.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 142

  • “Right from the beginning [Ernest] Hem[ingway] was horribly prone to accidents. I’ve never known a man who did so much damage to his own carcass.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 142

  • “[Pablo] Picasso was a small dark closed man. He had none of the offhand geniality that makes Spaniards in general easy to get along with. He was sardonic, earthily cynical in a special Spanish peasant way—the cynicism of Sancho Panza. He seemed to me impenetrable even in moments of relaxation and laughter. He was very much the master bricklayer, the master stonemason, the artisan. He was skill incarnate.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 153

  • “There’s a marvelous clarity about the light in the Valley of Mexico. Things and people stand out in brutal relief. People tend to become cartoons of themselves.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 170

  • “[Ernest Hem[ingway] was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 201

  • “From my youth I’d had great admiration for [Theodore] Dreiser. It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction for what seemed to me to be a truthful description of people’s lives. Without Dreiser’s treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish even.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Best Times, page 206

  • “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present…”

    —John Dos Passos, The Ground We Stand On, page 217

  • “We have taken the accomplishments in state building of the seventeenth century colonists…for granted, as we took the rich forest loam and the coal and the iron and the oil and the buffalo. We have wasted and exploited our political heritage with the same childish lack of foresight that has wrecked our forests and eroded our farmlands and ruined the grazing on the Great Plains.”

    —John Dos Passos, The Ground We Stand On, page 217

  • “The first thing a man—striving to come of age in any period of human history--has to do is to choose for himself what is true and what is not true, what is real and what is not real in the picture of society established for him by his elders.”

    —John Dos Passos, May 1965, Comments upon receiving the Alumni Seal Prize from Choate School