Sinclair Lewis

Name: Main Street — Chapter XXI
Author: Sinclair Lewis

Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

Summary

“Main Street — Chapter XXI”, published in 1920, is a work by Sinclair Lewis. It explores elements such as Vida, Carol and Kennicott.

Quotes from Main Street — Chapter XXI (Sinclair Lewis)

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably fascinated. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way."
Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject.
Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ I GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!"
He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ You always appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity.
In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street — Chapter XXI (1920)

“ About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another man. ”

Sinclair Lewis

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Quotes from Main Street — Chapter XXI (Sinclair Lewis)

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