“Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.”

“Of course the merchandise appears to be cheaper. Because where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in good expresses itself as cheapness. And since there are also so many shoppers crowded together, the goods make less of a challenge or an appeal to them; and so they too become humble. If the very large department store looked to begin with like a work of hubris, it comes to seem merely an enormous container for human smalless and modesty; an enormous confession of earthly cheapness.”

“I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.”

“Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them.”

“It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the "copy.”

“Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down.”

“The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.”