Finished MAIN STREET

Well, I finally finished the Sinclair Lewis novel Main Street, and a pretty great novel it is!  The book's full of quotable lines, like these:

Sunday sermon: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices.  There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background.  And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations."

Same sermon: "...but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists.  Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in..."

"It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.  I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future.  It will be magnificent.  But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, but bullied and bullied by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future!"

"In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them.  They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home."

"Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedures....  we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic."

"She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb."

"Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street."

"The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum.  It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece.  He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure.  He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph."

"Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them.  They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter."

"But I have won in this:  I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them.  I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be!  I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe!  I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!  I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."