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
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.
Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.
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