The Jungle Quotes
"It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive."
"The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull 'broom, broom' of a cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics."
"She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster."
"The reader, who perhaps has never held much converse in the language of far-off Lithuania, will be glad of the explanation that the place was the rear-room of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as 'back of the yards.'"
"There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed."
"He could take up a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound quarter of beef and carry it into a car without a stagger, or even a thought."
"There was a great steam-power plant and an electricity plant."
"The resulting medley of sound distracted no one, save possibly alone the babies, of which there were present a number equal to the total possessed by all the guests invited."
"It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory."
"They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which seemed to run on forever, mile after mile."
"It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics."
"Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was."
"Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare."
"The uproar was appalling, perilous to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold."
"They were all filled—so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world."
"Jurgis was even glad that he had not seen the place before meeting with his triumph, for he felt that the size of it would have overwhelmed him."
"He was at work at last! He was at work and earning money! All day long he was figuring to himself."
"It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it plunged them into an agony of despair."
"They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had been so crushed and trampled!"
"It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost."
"They had opened their hearts, like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon them."
"The streets through which our friends had to go to their work were all unpaved and full of deep holes and gullies."
"The very first Sunday they had all been taken to mass; and poor as they were, Elzbieta had felt it advisable to invest a little of her resources in a representation of the babe of Bethlehem."
"There was only one condition attached—you must drink."
"They would wrap up in all they owned, but they could not wrap up against exhaustion."
"They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything was black."
"It was cruel, iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone."
"The sheer volume of Marija’s energy was overwhelming."
"A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius."
"People paid Tamoszius big money to come and make music on state occasions."
"It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights."
"Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to talk about what one knows."
"After that he no longer made love to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for hours in the kitchen, blissfully happy in each other’s arms."
"Marija was really the capitalist of the party, for she had become an expert can-painter by this time."
"Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow; one could not count upon such good fortune forever."
"The newspapers had been full of this scandal."
"This was a scene of wild confusion, women shrieking and wringing their hands and fainting, and men fighting and trampling down everything in their way."
"He was no longer the finest-looking man in the throng, and the bosses no longer made for him."
"They would get new pacemakers and pay them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery."
"He had been discontented for a long time, and not without some cause."
"In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was secondhand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him."
"Some had been frankly told that they were too old, that a sprier man was needed."
"The vast majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless packing-machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could not keep up with it any more."
"What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon the circumstances."
"A man could live and save on that; but then there were only half a dozen splitters in each place."
"An unmarried man could save, if he did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish."
"He was the last of Teta Elzbieta’s children, and perhaps he had been intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough."
"All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little dress, whining and fretting."
"Her child to be buried in a pauper’s grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said without protesting!"
"He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth."
"There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest."
"In the dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars."
"Working in his shirtsleeves, and with the thermometer at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis’s skin."
"So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over the country."
"It was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment."
"She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all this without a murmur."
"And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them."
"This was not always his mood, of course; he still loved his family."
"The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them."
"They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside."
"And from all the unending horror of this there was a respite, a deliverance—he could drink!"
"He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after week."
"It was a thing scarcely to be spoken—a thing never spoken by all the world, that will not know its own defeat."
"They would sell their furniture, and then run into debt at the stores, and then be refused credit."
"Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time."
"Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do."
"Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent."
"Yet the soul of Ona was not dead—the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping."
"Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross."
"Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own."
"He would be a man again, and master of his life."
"Jurgis shot one swift glance up and down the platform—the man was not on it."
You little villain," he cried, "you didn’t try!
"She tried to go to work, too. She had to. We were all starving."
"She has been trying to get other work," the boy went on.
"I haf done my best," she began suddenly.
"I can do netting more—dere is no use to try."
"What’s the matter with Marija?" cried Jurgis.
"We couldn’t make him stay in. He must have got caught in the mud!"
"I am very hungry," said Jurgis, gravely; "I would like to buy some food."
"Ask the woman," said the farmer, nodding over his shoulder.
"It would be the first time that he had been all the way into the water since he left Lithuania!"
"That was his answer, and it showed his mood; from now on he was fighting, and the man who hit him would get all that he gave, every time."
"Yes," said Jurgis, "that’s what they all think; and so they crowd into the cities, and when they have to beg or steal to live, then people ask ’em why they don’t go into the country, where help is scarce."
"I’m not looking for work just now," Jurgis answered.
"How about when your money’s gone?" he inquired, finally. "You’ll have to, then, won’t you?"
"Wait till she’s gone," said Jurgis; "then I’ll see."
"He was a stranger at the business, but they were not clannish, and they taught him all their tricks."
"The old wanderlust had got into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit."
"He never asked where he was nor where he was going; the country was big enough, he knew, and there was no danger of his coming to the end of it."
"And so he set Aunt Polly to watch me—hic—an’ now Polly’s off in the hospital havin’ twins, an’ me out raisin’ Cain!"
"He had lost in the fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated; and all society was busied to see that he did not escape the sentence."
"It was in the latter part of July, when Jurgis was in Missouri, that he came upon the harvest-work."
"The harvest-fever was in the very air, and no man with any spirit in him could be in that region and not catch it."
"It would be a long time before he could be like the majority of these men of the road, who roamed until the hunger for drink and for women mastered them."
"It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting ‘graft,’ and was willing to pay over a share of it."
"The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary."
"There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office-boy to the head of a city department."
"Jurgis spent his Christmas in this hospital, and it was the pleasantest Christmas he had had in America."
"He was like a wounded animal in the forest; he was forced to compete with his enemies upon unequal terms."