John Steinbeck Quotes

War is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds. ~ John Steinbeck

And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. ~ John Steinbeck

Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. ~ John Steinbeck

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes ... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so. ~ John Steinbeck

You got to think about that day, an' then the nex' day. Jus' take ever' day. ~ John Steinbeck

One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long ~ John Steinbeck

Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one. ~ John Steinbeck

Every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. ~ John Steinbeck

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. ~ John Steinbeck

They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil. I made mistakes in manners, and I didn't know delicacies that had grown up since my father left. They wouldn't have me. You can believe it or not - I'm less foreign here than I was in China. ~ John Steinbeck

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff. ~ John Steinbeck

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else. ~ John Steinbeck

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it. ~ John Steinbeck

The mountains sat with their feet in the sea, and the old man's house was on the knees. ~ John Steinbeck

Let's get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let's close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. ~ John Steinbeck

He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. ~ John Steinbeck

The winter night blew in with frosty wind, and the street lamps with their sputtering carbons swung restlessly and made the shadows dart back and forth like a runner trying to steal second base. ~ John Steinbeck

Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future. ~ John Steinbeck

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty. ~ John Steinbeck

And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended. ~ John Steinbeck

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ~ John Steinbeck

The land is so much more than its analysis. ~ John Steinbeck

To be alive at is to have scars. ~ John Steinbeck

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked. ~ John Steinbeck

You can't slice up morals. ~ John Steinbeck

There's a passage in John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" that does a pretty good job describing California's rainfall patterns:

The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ... ~ John Steinbeck

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys? ~ John Steinbeck

A girl was just a girl to you. They wasn't nothin' to you. But to me they was holy vessels. I was savin' their souls. An' here with all that responsibility on me I'd just get 'em frothin' with the Holy Sperit, an' then I'd take 'em out in the grass." "Maybe I should of been a preacher,' said Joad. ~ John Steinbeck

the whisky muttered in his ears. ~ John Steinbeck

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

You know, Suzy, they ain't no way in the world to get in trouble by keeping your mouth shut. You look back at every mess you ever got in and you'll find your tongue started it. ~ John Steinbeck

For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. ~ John Steinbeck

croton oil on the string beans and stirred it in. She went to her room and ~ John Steinbeck

On the fences the shiny blackbirds with red epaulets clicked their dry call. The meadowlarks sang like water, and the wild doves, concealed among the bursting leaves of the oaks, made a sound of restrained grieving. ~ John Steinbeck

A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. ~ John Steinbeck

George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to. ~ John Steinbeck

Woman can change better'n man," Ma said soothingly. "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head. ~ John Steinbeck

One night i rode home - it was a confession - and i came staggering across the yard and i fell into the rosebush and crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees and i was sick on the floor beside my bed. In the morning I tried to tell him I was sorry, and do you know what he said? 'Why, Tom, you were just jolly'. 'Jolly,' if I did it. A drunken man didn't crawl home. Just Jolly ~ John Steinbeck

And he wore high-heeled boots and spurs to prove he was not a laboring man. ~ John Steinbeck

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ~ John Steinbeck

Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. ~ John Steinbeck

Lennie said quietly, It ain't no lie. We're gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an' live on the fatta the lan'. ~ John Steinbeck

There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. ~ John Steinbeck

My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the Ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr ... She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her. ~ John Steinbeck

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. ~ John Steinbeck

Luck, you see, brings bitter friends. ~ John Steinbeck

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man's trouser cuff or the hem of a woman's skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement. ~ John Steinbeck

Maybe what I want ain't anywhere in the world, but I want it, so I think there is such a thing. I want a guy that's wide open. I want him to be a real guy, maybe even a tough guy, but I want a window in him. He can have his dukes up every other place but not with me. And he got to need the hell out of me. He got to be the kind of guy that if he aint' got me he ain't got nothing. And brother, that guys' going to have something! ~ John Steinbeck

Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over ... ~ John Steinbeck

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft ... a kind of breaking through to glory. ~ John Steinbeck

Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refired. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect cup
thin, strong, translucent?" He held his cup to the light. " All impurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that
more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection." He drained his cup and he said loudly, "Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us
would stop trying? ~ John Steinbeck

It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods. ~ John Steinbeck

And in his dream, Coyotito was reading from a book as large as a house, with letters as big as dogs, and the words galloped and played on the book. ~ John Steinbeck

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success ... Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. ~ John Steinbeck

Teresina went often to confession. She was the despair of Father Ramon. Indeed he had seen that while her knees, her hands, and her lips did penance for an old sin, her modest and provocative eyes, flashing under drawn lashes, laid the foundation for a new one. During ~ John Steinbeck

They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out. This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old. Now ~ John Steinbeck

... it does clarify a tough to get it spoken, even if no one listens. ~ John Steinbeck

A writer of stories is a liar. ~ John Steinbeck

Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have. ~ John Steinbeck

Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain. ~ John Steinbeck

Adam said, I bet you couldn't sleep if you stayed in bed. You know what I bet? I bet you get up because you want to, and then you take credit for it - like taking credit for six fingers. ~ John Steinbeck

We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world--temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind--what used in the university to be called a 'dry-ball'--but such men are not really biologists. They are the embalmers of the field, the picklers who see only the preserved form of life without any of its principle. Out of their own crusted minds they create a world wrinkled with formaldehyde. The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. The dry-balls cannot possibly learn a thing every starfish knows in the core of his soul and in the vesicles between his rays. He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions: one or two have had a little trouble about it. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity ~ John Steinbeck

Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years. ~ John Steinbeck

Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else. ~ John Steinbeck

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression. ~ Lou Holtz

You keep out of my bed, said Danny, for he knew that Joe Portagee had come to stay. The way he sat in a chair and crossed his knees had an appearance of permanence. ~ John Steinbeck

It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put there faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potential moral units- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coat-tails. ~ John Steinbeck

Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped? ~ John Steinbeck

An' it all just amounts to what you tell yourself. ~ John Steinbeck

I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings. ~ John Steinbeck

having nothing that can be stolen, exploited, ~ John Steinbeck

Hm-m," he said. "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone. Guess who
I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-
all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn't even think I was listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone. ~ John Steinbeck

Show me the man who isn't interested in discussing himself. ~ John Steinbeck

He shoveled the bacon out on a plate and broke the eggs in the hot grease and they
jumped and fluttered their edges to brown lace and made clucking sounds. ~ John Steinbeck

There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party. ~ John Steinbeck

The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul? ~ John Steinbeck

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. ~ John Steinbeck

Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story(from the Bible)turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was,but now I know it is.
~ John Steinbeck

But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes. ~ John Steinbeck

I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im. ~ John Steinbeck

In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? ~ John Steinbeck

Life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it ~ John Steinbeck

No more in life would that face be free of care. ~ John Steinbeck

I guess there are never enough books. ~ John Steinbeck

Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head. ~ John Steinbeck

From the Grapes of Wrath and a woman that would not be moved: 'On'y way you gonna get me to go is whup me.' She moved the jack handle gently again. 'An' I'll shame you, Pa. I won't take no whuppin', cryin' an' a-beggin'. I'll light into you. An' you ain't so sure you can whup me anyways. An' if ya do get me, I swear to God I'll wait till you got your back turned, or you're settin' down, an' I'll knock you belly-up with a bucket. I swear to Holy Jesus' sake I will. ~ John Steinbeck

They was this rich fella, an he makes like he's poor, an they's this rich girl, an she purtends like she's poor too, an' they meet in a hamburg' stan'
Why?
I don't know why-that's how it was.
Why'd they purtend like they's poor?
Well, they're tired of bein' rich.
Horseshit!
You want to hear this, or not?
Well, go on then. Sure, I wanta hear it, but if I was rich, if I was rich I'd get so many pork chops-I'd cord 'em up aroun' me like wood, an' I'd eat my way out. Go on. ~ John Steinbeck

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. ~ John Steinbeck

Even Juan laughed then. Everyone laughed. And suddenly the bus was not full of strangers. Some chemical association was formed. Norma laughed hysterically. All the tension of the morning came out in her laughter. ~ John Steinbeck

The first few years after Samuel came to Salinas Valley there was a vague distrust of him. And perhaps Will as a little boy heard talk in the San Lucas store. Little boys don't want their fathers to be different from other men. Will might have picked up his conservatism right then. ~ John Steinbeck

I will. I surely will. Good-by, ma'am." As ~ John Steinbeck

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. ~ John Steinbeck

But the loneliness was still on Danny and demanded an outlet.
'Here we sit,' he began at last.
' - broken-hearted,' Pilon added rhythmically.
'No, this is not a poem,' Danny said. 'Here we sit, homeless. We gave our lives for our country, and now we have no roof over our head.'
'We never did have,' Pilon added helpfully.
Danny drank dreamily until Pilon touched his elbow and took the bottle.
'That reminds me,' Danny said, 'of a story of a man who owned two whore-houses
' His mouth dropped open. 'Pilon! my little fat duck of a baby friend. I had forgotten! I am an heir! I own two houses.'
'Whore-houses?' Pilon asked hopefully. 'Thou art a drunken liar,' he continued.
'No, Pilon. I tell the truth. The viejo died. I am the heir. I, the favourite grandson.'
'Thou art the only grandson,' said the realist Pilon. ~ John Steinbeck

But when you get hunted - that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong; maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain't a hunter no more. I'd maybe shoot a fella in the dark, but I don't maul nobody with a fence stake no more. It don't do no good to fool you or me. That's how it is. ~ John Steinbeck

I can't tell you how to live your life," Samuel said, "although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining
small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come of age. ~ John Steinbeck

The trees and the muscled mountains are the world – but not the world apart from man – the world and man – the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know. ~ John Steinbeck

You're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. And more - you'll see - you're buying bitterness. ~ John Steinbeck

Do you take pride in your hurt?' Samuel asked. 'Does it make you seem large and tragic? ... Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience ... there's all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow? ~ John Steinbeck

It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands, and the men who sat in their offices and waited for Kino knew what price they would offer, how high they would bid, and what method each one would use. And although these men would not profit beyond their salaries, there was excitement among the pearl buyers, for there was excitement in the hunt, and if it be a man's function to break down a price, then he must take joy and satisfaction in breaking it as far down as possible. For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it. Quite apart from any reward they might get, from any word of praise, from any promotion, a pearl buyer was a pearl buyer, and the best and happiest pearl buyer was he who bought for the lowest prices. ~ John Steinbeck

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward. ~ John Steinbeck