“No dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.”

“At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.”

“Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone-breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians, and they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them.”

“I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her."I'm sure you...""It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want.""It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,but...""If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

“Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

“Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.”

“...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust”