Citations de Arrowsmith

“He rarely left his small brown weedy house except to return to his laboratory, and few students outside of his classes had ever identified him, but every one had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered about him.”

“Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between the sheets--soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was the perfect person to whom to sell useless things.”

“Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because he was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall of Main Medical without shouting, “How’s your vermiform appendix functioning this morning?” or “I bid thee a lofty greeting, old pediculosis.””

“The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfullest critics.”

“It was true; he was half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics, nothing of history, nothing of music or painting.”

“It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.”

“It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has no right to waste the public time in being curious, but the irresponsible sniffing beagle in Martin drove out the faithful routineer.”

“As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven million people hungry for sleep or love or money.”

“He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade forth to be pawed by every blind devotee and mud-spattered by every blind enemy.”

“They borrowed cigarettes from each other; they went out at the most improbable hours to have flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they handled test-tubes charged with death.”

“No one liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; every one fled from every one else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous than its brother, the Plague.”