Theodore Dreiser

The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.

Dusk⁠—of a summer night.

“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That squid wasn’t quick enough.”

Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge.

She felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest⁠—felt her own helplessness without quite realising the wisp on the tide that she was.

These mighty adjurations were as silver and gold plates set in a wall of dross.

“I would rather crawl on my hands and knees than let my paper go to protest,”

This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city!

There is nothing in this world more delightful than that middle state in which we mentally balance at times, possessed of the means, lured by desire, and yet deterred by conscience or want of decision.

What a wretched thing it was to be born poor and not to have anyone to do anything for you and not to be able to do so very much for yourself!

Capital, frightened by uncertain trade and money conditions, everywhere, retired to its hiding-places in banks, vaults, teakettles, and stockings.

It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.

She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse.

But having the temperament of a spider that spins a web for flies, she foresaw that this might involve the possibility of Louise’s explaining to Clyde or Ratterer that it was Hortense who had instigated the party.

Aileen always reminded Cowperwood of a high-stepping horse without a checkrein.

Such is the subtlety of contact.

It lessens a woman’s opinion of a man when she learns that his admiration is so pointedly and generously distributed.

Indeed in his immature and really psychically unilluminated mind it suddenly evoked a mood which was as of roses, perfumes, lights and music.

It was Butler’s habit when he became involved in these family quarrels, which were as shallow as puddles, to wave his hands rather antagonistically under his wife’s or his children’s noses.

The danger of publicity, and even moderate social success, is that scandal loves a shining mark.