Faith & Spirit Quote by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

There is a hard-boiled clarity in Davis's warning: the bargain is grotesquely asymmetrical. Your soul is permanent, intimate capital; "peanuts" are cheap, throwaway currency. The line works because it collapses a whole ecosystem of compromise into a single, humiliating image: you degrading yourself so an audience you don't respect can be briefly entertained.

The monkeys matter. They arent villains, exactly; theyre a crowd conditioned to clap for tricks, to demand constant feed. Davis aims her critique not only at the cynic who cashes out, but at the cultural machinery that rewards smallness. "Sell your soul" is classic moral language, but paired with "peanuts" it becomes economic language too: the payout is laughably low. That sting is the point. Plenty of people rationalize selling out as pragmatic adulthood. Davis refuses the romance of necessity. If you must compromise, at least demand a price that acknowledges the cost.

Contextually, coming from a mid-century American writer who worked in and around mass-market publishing, the quote reads like industry advice sharpened into ethics. It could be aimed at editors chasing trends, journalists writing clickbait before clickbait had a name, or any creative asked to sand down the strange edges to become "marketable". The subtext is professional but also existential: the quickest way to lose your voice is to start writing for the cage, not the page.