A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
John Dos PassosRead
Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love and life are easily accessible, but the pursuit of money is what requires effort and dedication.
John Dos Passos highlights the irony of modern life where emotional connections such as love and life itself are undervalued and readily available, while money, which is often prioritized, is depicted as scarce and worthy of hard work. This statement reflects a critique of societal values that emphasize material wealth over the intrinsic worth of personal relationships and experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the true sources of happiness.
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.
The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
It's wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.
Choice is the engine of our evolution ... if you choose unconsciously, you will evolve unconsciously. If you choose consciously, you will evolve consciously
For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.
I've always liked the idea of making things that last forever, not necessarily in the sense of being unbreakable, but more psychologically permanent. Most people throw stuff away not because it's broken but because their relationship with that object is broken.
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
People often ask me whether I prefer theater or film, and the answer is that I prefer the one I'm not doing: The grass is always greener.
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