3
" The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it. "
― Theodore Dreiser
5
" Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey for their sole delight. They have no feeling that any result which might flow from their action should concern them. They have no conception of the necessity of a well-organized society wherein all shall accept a certain quota of responsibility and all realize a reasonable amount of happiness. They think only of themselves because they have not yet been taught to think of society. For them pain and necessity are the great taskmasters. Laws are but the fences which circumscribe the sphere of their operations. When, after error, pain falls as a lash, they do not comprehend that their suffering is due to misbehavior. Many such an individual is so lashed by necessity and law that he falls fainting to the ground, dies hungry in the gutter or rotting in the jail and it never once flashes across his mind that he has been lashed only in so far as he has persisted in attempting to trespass the boundaries which necessity sets. A prisoner of fate, held enchained for his own delight, he does not know that the walls are tall, that the sentinels of life are forever pacing, musket in hand. He cannot perceive that all joy is within and not without. He must be for scaling the bounds of society, for overpowering the sentinel. When we hear the cries of the individual strung up by the thumbs, when we hear the ominous shot which marks the end of another victim who has thought to break loose, we may be sure that in another instance life has been misunderstood--we may be sure that society has been struggled against until death alone would stop the individual from contention and evil. "
― Theodore Dreiser , Sister Carrie
9
" He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour. "
― Theodore Dreiser
10
" The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many. "
― Theodore Dreiser
19
" Cowperwood, who saw things in the large, could scarcely endure this minutae. He was but little
interested in the affairs of bygone men and women, being so intensely engaged with the living present.
And after a time he slipped outside, preferring the wide sweep of gardens, with their flower-lined
walks and views of the cathedral. Its arches and towers and stained-glass windows, this whole
carefully executed shrine, still held glamor, but all because of the hands and brains, aspirations and
dreams of selfish and self-preserving creatures like himself. And so many of these, as he now mused,
walking about, had warred over possession of this church. And now they were within its walls,
graced and made respectable, the noble dead! Was any man noble? Had there ever been such a thing
as an indubitably noble soul? He was scarcely prepared to believe it. Men killed to live—all of them
—and wallowed in lust in order to reproduce themselves. In fact, wars, vanities, pretenses, cruelties,
greeds, lusts, murder, spelled their true history, with only the weak running to a mythical saviour or
god for aid. And the strong using this belief in a god to further the conquest of the weak. And by such
temples or shrines as this. He looked, meditated, and was somehow touched with the futility of so "
― Theodore Dreiser