Rosinante to the Road Again

“between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground.””

— John Dos Passos

“Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal.””

— John Dos Passos

“That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any in Europe.””

— John Dos Passos

“And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him the service was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them away with a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and the noise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked in succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life was sucked away into this one poem in praise of death.””

— John Dos Passos

“Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life.””

— John Dos Passos

“The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked thought.””

— John Dos Passos

“The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.””

— John Dos Passos

“Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real.””

— John Dos Passos

“While his bread remains sweet, his novels may be as bitter as he likes.””

— John Dos Passos