The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
I was feeling rational and restless, which is horrible for watching movies
It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
There’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!
In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.
Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?
I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.” – Carol Kennicott
The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!
Oh, quit it! You’re the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business…then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth…
And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on ‘Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt’ had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.
The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.
People will buy anything that’s one to a customer.
People will buy anything that is ‘one to a customer.’
When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.
Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country emotionally I know she is better than every other country.