Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiserwas an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrieand An American Tragedy. In 1930 he was nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 August 1871
CityTerre Haute, IN
needs brilliant underestimate
Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.
want terrible sad-things
It is a sad thing to want for happiness, but it is a terrible thing to see another groping about blindly for it, when it is almost within the grasp.
beauty dust strikes
I will kneel and strike my breast, then touch the dust with my forehead; I will, I will. Only do not forsake me, oh god of beauty.
color world
A thought will color a world for us.
last-words
Shakespeare, I come !
success air hands
I have seen youths bright eyed and fair groping after bubbles in rapture, and conceiving them diamonds and the glitter of fine jewels, until their hand closed over a something that was not to be felt nor longer seen, mere colored air.
fighting swings hands
We who feel that justice is not being done have but one thing to do: that is fight, by argument, by example, by insistence on fair play wherever we have the power to do so. The rest is in the hands of the Lord, or nature, which swings, apparently, from one extreme to another.
football strong winning
Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.
book views exhibitions
We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.
evil reactions distress
Depend upon it; from every condition of distress or evil, there is a great reaction, and the greater the distress or evil, the greater the reaction.
eye men desire
When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.
real love-is flames
A real flame of love is a subtle thing. It burns as a will-o'-the-wisp, dancing onward to fairy lands of delight. It roars as a furnace. Too often jealousy is the quality upon which it feeds.
Nothing is proved, all is permitted.
girl fall home
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse