Jenny Gerhardt - Theodore Dreiser

A man with a little money is just like a cat with a bell around its neck. Every rat knows exactly where it is and what it is doing.

Could a broken bowl be mended and called whole?
It might be called whole, but what of it?
Was it not broken and mended?

Life at worst or best was beautiful—had always been so.

It is so hard for us to know what we have not seen. It is so difficult for us to feel what we have not experienced.

There are crises in all men's lives when they waver between the strict fulfilment of justice and duty and the great possibilities for personal happiness which another line of conduct seems to assure.

The significance of the material and spiritual changes which sometimes overtake us are not very clear at the time.
A sense of shock, a sense of danger, and then apparently we subside to old ways, but the change has come.
Never again, here or elsewhere, will we be the same.

That other world of flesh into which has been woven pride and greed looks askance at the idealist, the dreamer.
If one says it is sweet to look at the clouds, the answer is a warning against idleness.
If one seeks to give ear to the winds, it shall be well with his soul, but they will seize upon his possessions.
If all the world of the so-called inanimate delay one, calling with tenderness in sounds that seem to be too perfect to be less than understanding, it shall be ill with the body.
The hands of the actual are forever reaching toward such as these—forever seizing greedily upon them.
It is of such that the bond servants are made.

Virtue is that quality of generosity which offers itself willingly for another's service, and, being this, it is held by society to be nearly worthless. Sell yourself cheaply and you shall be used lightly and trampled under foot. Hold yourself dearly, however unworthily, and you will be respected. Society, in the mass, lacks woefully in the matter of discrimination. Its one criterion is the opinion of others. Its one test that of self-preservation. Has he preserved his fortune? Has she preserved her purity? Only in rare instances and with rare individuals does there seem to be any guiding light from within.

Only in rare instances and with rare individuals does there seem to be any guiding light from within.

Did anything matter except goodness—goodness of heart? What else was there that was real?

It is a curious characteristic of the non-defensive disposition that it is like a honey-jar to flies. Nothing is brought to it and much is taken away. Around a soft, yielding, unselfish disposition men swarm naturally. They sense this generosity, this non-protective attitude from afar.

The written word and the hidden thought—how they conflict!

The relationship of man and woman...no more difficult or trying situation than this of mutual compatibility broken or disrupted by untoward conditions which in themselves have so little to do with the real force and beauty of the relationship itself.

Nature is unkind in permitting the minor type to bear a child at all.

How much the average home depends upon the mother was seen when it was feared the end was near.

There are natures born to the inheritance of flesh that come without understanding, and that go again without seeming to have wondered why.