The Grapes Of Wrath Quotes

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

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars! ~ Richard Corliss

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

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

I was mean life a wolf. Now i'm mean like a weasel. When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. 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 no hunter no more. ~ John Steinbeck

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't a man. The bank isn't like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men. ~ John Steinbeck

After you told me the part about Las Vegas, you know how I said it was the stupidest story I had ever heard?"
"You didn't say that."
"Well, I was thinkin' it. But I've decided I owe that Las Vegas story an apology because this last thing made that one look like The Grapes of Wrath. ~ David Wong

I ain't sleepin'. I got too much to puzzle with. ~ John Steinbeck

We'll start over. But you can't start. Only a baby can start ~ John Steinbeck

My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath,' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. ~ Jane Fonda

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression. ~ Frank Rich

I seen fellas like you before. You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song. 'What we comin' to?' You don' wanta know. Country's movin' aroun', goin' places. They's folks dyin' all aroun'. Maybe you'll die pretty soon, but you won't know nothin'. I seen too many fellas like you. You don't want to know nothin'. Just sing yourself to sleep with a song - 'What we comin' to? ~ John Steinbeck

You could think of extraordinary examples to the contrary: The Grapes of Wrath ... and even into the 70s. ~ Charlton Heston

One thing I like about the 1950s is that kids were hip without any sense of irony about it. They were dressing in fifties cool-cat clothing with complete sincerity. Nobody wanted to be"retro"back then. With the Depression still fresh in everybody's mind, did anyone in the 1950s dress up as the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, and go to Dust Bowl-themed parties because they thought it was cool? Probably not. In the past, the past was something you wanted to forget about rather than romanticize. I really miss those days. ~ Frank Conniff

Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.'
'We take a beatin' all the time.'
'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'. ~ John Steinbeck

When I closed THE GRAPES OF WRATH, I was a different man. It enriched my powers of thinking and discipline, and my relationships. I left prison more informed than when I went in. And the more informed you are, the less arrogant and aggressive you are. ~ Nelson Mandela

Sometimes the sweetest wine is squeezed from the grapes of wrath ~ Jack Gallo

It ain't kin we? It's will we? ~ John Steinbeck

I'm glad there's love here. That's all. ~ John Steinbeck

An' I got to thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin', it was deeper down than thinkin'. ~ John Steinbeck

I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. ~ John Steinbeck

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. ~ John Steinbeck

Have you read 'The Grapes of Wrath?' That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was. ~ B. Wayne Hughes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored ... ~ Julia Ward Howe

In the souls of the people The Grapes of Wrath are Filling and Growing Heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Happy 112th Birthday John Steinbeck. ~ John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' also speaks urgently to today's concerns: the cratered trail of dreams for Mexican immigrants seeking a promised land in the Western [United States]; the perfidy of banks in foreclosing on poor people's homes; and the insurgent urge of the book's protagonist, Tom Joad, to speak truth to police power. 'Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy,' Tom promises, 'I'll be there.' In Salinas, Calif., Ferguson, Mo., or Staten Island, N.Y., Tom's truth goes marching on. ~ Richard Corliss

We got to get thinkin' about doin' stuff that means somepin. ~ John Steinbeck

The one-eyed man stood helplessly by. "I'll help ya if ya want," he said. "Know what that son-of-a-bitch done? He come by an' he got on white pants. An' he says, 'Come on, le's go out to my yacht.' By God, I'll whang him some day!" He breathed heavily. "I ain't been out with a woman sence I los' my eye. An' he says stuff like that." And big tears cut channels in the dirt beside his nose.

Tom said impatiently, "Whyn't you roll on? Got no guards to keep ya here."

"Yeah, that's easy to say. Ain't so easy to get a job - not for a one-eye' man."

Tom turned on him. "Now look-a-here, fella. You got that eye wide open. An' ya dirty, ya stink. Ya jus' askin' for it. Ya like it. Lets ya feel sorry for yaself. 'Course ya can't get no woman with that empty eye flappin' aroun'. Put somepin over it an' wash ya face. You ain't hittin' nobody with no pipe wrench."

"I tell ya, a one-eye' fella got a hard row," the man said. "Can't see stuff the way other fellas can. Can't see how far off a thing is. Ever'thing's jus' flat."

Tom said, "Ya full of crap. Why, I knowed a one-legged whore one time. Think she was takin' two-bits in a alley? No, by God! She's gettin' half a dollar extra. She says, 'How many one-legged women you slep' with? None!' she says. 'O.K.,' she says. 'You got somepin pretty special here, an it's gonna cos' ya half a buck extry.' An' by God, she was gettin' 'em, too, an' the fellas comin' out thinkin' they're pretty lucky. ~ John Steinbeck

This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don' know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. ~ John Steinbeck

I never fixed no car in my life 'thout cuttin' myself. Now it's done I don't have to worry no more. ~ John Steinbeck

I climb fences when i got fences to climb. ~ John Steinbeck

And in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The Grapes Of Wrath ~ John Steinbeck

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison

SUMMER DEEP"
"Summer deep is in the hills again
His lady is a lioness
Winds of birds blow through the fields again
Invaders from the true worlds
A coat of grapes is on my back again
I ride upon my zebra
Pterodactyl beak hat on my brow
The truth is like a stranger
Be like you could
All my friends say. ~ Marc Bolan

A good word will spread in the grapevine, bringing forth clusters of grapes and the benevolent of wine; a bad word will spread withering the vines, and choke the potential grapes. ~ Anthony Liccione

I never ate of the grapes nor feared of the eruptions. ~ David O. Selznick

A winemaker never, never changes the character of a wine. The character comes from the grapes. ~ Michel Rolland

The sun had already set behind the mountains, and the sky had been drained of color. The trellises of sauvignon blanc flowed down the hill in even rows toward the valley floor. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn't outside. As far as I could tell, the grapes were minding their own business. ~ Frederick Weisel

In the land of sour grapes, the half-eaten apple is the queen ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grapes on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer. ~ Lorna Sage

I would say 95% of the time, because you just can't remember your lines if you're drinking alcohol. I would say about 95% of the time it was grape juice or this fake wine, which was horrible. ~ Thomas Haden Church

And never since harvests were ripened, / Or laborers born, / Have men gathered figs of the thistle, / Or grapes of the thorn! ~ Phoebe Cary

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not ge ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives you will have it steaming and burning at your tables: so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times: you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes, this bowl of silent blood that will be there each morning, each morning. A ~ Pablo Neruda

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain. ~ Luke Harding

What is wine? It is the grape present in another form; its essence is there, though the fruit which produced it grew thousands of miles away, and perished years ago. So the object of many a tender thought may be spiritually present, in defiance of space - and fond recollections cherished in defiance of time. ~ Samuel Lover

Remind thyself that he whom thou lovest is mortal - that what
thou lovest is not thine own; it is given thee for the present, not
irrevocably nor for ever, but even as a fig or a bunch of grapes at
the appointed season of the year ~ Epictetus

I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love." She is whispering that, and she whispers, "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine. He said, this stature of mine is like to a palm tree, and my breasts like clusters of grapes. He said he would come to me then. I am my beloved's and his desire is only toward me. ~ Neil Gaiman

I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes. ~ J.D. Salinger

Whether

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride,

and periodic burn-offs in the forest

revitalize exhausted soil and flora - .

Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat


jubilation of a lightning bolt

that whips its silver vein of genesis

through the night sky, flash-photo of a white

birch upended, the root-system buckled


to swollen thunderheads - . And whether naming

an offense amounts to sour grapes and common

bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense

of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping


insult to civilized behavior - . Whether

a July rainstorm, even when it drenches

the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles

traffic, might be extravagant, a joy,


like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos

of Gillespie's upraised horn, cascading pitches

a countersong to meteoric chalk marks

Perseids burn across the House of Leo - .


And whether peaceful ecstasy might float

up from a fifteen-second avalanche

reflected in the skier's goggles, his jacket

a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope,


waiting for the homeward track to clear. ~ Alfred Corn

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. ~ Galileo Galilei

I'd always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo–people laboring in the vineyards of pseudo–intellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self–aggrandizement. ~ Walt Shiel

Another piece of Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 ended up landing in a grape vineyard on planet Pinot. The Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 was quickly absorbed into the soil and was subsequently soaked up into the grapes. These grapes, which had until recently been harvested almost to extinction, suddenly became self-aware and super intelligent. They banded together in bunches and rose up to defeat their oppressors. The battle lasted one whole night, but sadly, it ended the next morning when the sun came up. The rebellion shriveled when the poor grapes ran out of juice. Apparently there's a raisin for everything. ~ Dav Pilkey

Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, Take it. This is my life. ~ Virginia Woolf

Without a time for growing, you could never have a feast. If there is no growth, what are you going to feast on? At the time of the feast, the people of Israel brought their riches - cows, lambs, grapes, all the produce which came from the growth. The feast of tabernacles, especially, was a feast for the enjoyment of the harvest. The Lord said that we must come together in His presence and enjoy the harvest - that is a feast. The feast is the result of growing, and this growing is very much related to the moon, the church. If we don't have the church, we lack the element of the feast. Very few Christians have the feast because they don't have the moon. They don't have the full enjoyment of Christ as a feast because they do not have the church. We need the church to appoint the seasons for growing and feasting. ~ Witness Lee

I'd Like to See
-----------------

I'd like to see the red
Of the roses in full bloom.
I'd like to see the silver
Of sun's reflection on the moon.

I'd like to see the blue
Of the ocean when it's roaring.
I'd like to see the brown
Of the eagle when it's soaring.

I'd like to see the purple
Of grapes hanging on the vine.
I'd like to see the yellow
Of the sun in summertime.

I'd like to see the russet
Of the chestnuts on the tree.
I'd like to see the faces
Of those that smile at me. ~ Lucinda Riley

Some questions are okay. You can't have people without questions. People are too curious for that, they'd get all gummed up and stop working right if you didn't let them have questions once in a while. But there's a big difference between asking for things and only asking. 'Do you think there will be grapes sometime this week' isn't the same as 'can I have some of those grapes.' Do you understand? ~ Seanan McGuire

I do hear snippets on the radio. I do hear a little bit of me, sometimes great chunks of me. But I have to take that as a compliment; there's no way you can get sour grapes about that. But if somebody starts taking your whole new thing lock, stock, and barrel, and do their own version of it before you do it, that's not on. ~ Jeff Beck

Some sins have no season. We are as likely to be angry in November as to lose our rag in March ... There is, though, something autumnal about greed, apple-cheeked and wheat-crowned, purpled knee-high in grapes; something summery in sloth, as the hammock creaks in the fly-drowsy heat; and more than a tickle of spring in lust, as birds pair and the sap rises. Among these, ingratitude is winter, the worst of seasons. ~ Ann Wroe

To defend Western Europe we have to let the Pentagon buy all these tanks and guns and things, and the Pentagon is unable to buy any object that that costs less than a condominium in Vail. If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700 Seedless Tactical Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and will have an 83 percent failure rate. ~ Dave Barry

On one of the evenings, apropos of nothing ('apropos' was another new word), when Dr Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr Hunter turned to Reggie and said, 'You now there are no rules,' and Reggie said, 'Really?' because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike Ms MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr Hunter was very keen on. She said, 'No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn't a template, a pattern that we're supposed to follow. There's no one watching us to see if we're doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along. ~ Kate Atkinson

a brief history of art
Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvasses of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess - critical term - so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all. ~ David Nicholls

In our short walks we passed the kitchen where food was prepared for the nurses and doctors. There we got glimpses of melons and grapes and all kinds of fruits, beautiful white bread and nice meats, and the hungry feeling would be increased tenfold. ~ Nellie Bly

Shibui: a kind of beauty that only time can reveal. Shibui was the subtle beauty of grey and brown moss on an old rock. And the taste of an old wine which recalled a ripening of grapes and the perfect balance of sun, wind and rain - that too was shibui. Drisana's face radiated shibui - 'radiate' was not quite the right word - her face revealed the grain of her character and her life's experiences as if it were a piece of ivory painstakingly and beautifully carved by time. ~ David Zindell

My thanks for your hospitality, Roran Stronghammer," he said, raising his voice so that his entire troop could hear. "Mayhap I will soon have the honor of entertaining you within the walls of Aroughs. If so, I promise to serve you the finest wines from my family's estate, and perhaps with them I will be able to wean you off such barbaric milk as you have there. I think you will find our wine has much to recommend it. We let it age in oaken casks for months or sometimes even years. It would be a pity if all that work were wasted and the casks were knocked open and the wine were allowed to run out into the streets and paint them red with the blood of our grapes."
"That would indeed be a shame," Roran replied, "but sometimes you cannot avoid spilling a bit of wine when cleaning your table." Holding the horn out to one side, he tipped it over and poured what little mead remained onto the grass below.
Tharos was utterly still for a moment--even the feathers on his helm were motionless--then, with an angry snarl, he yanked his horse around and shouted at his men, "Form up! Form up, I say…Yah!" And with that final yell, he spurred his horse away from Roran, and the rest of the soldiers followed, urging their steeds to a gallop as they retraced their steps to Aroughs.
Roran maintained his pretense of arrogance and indifference until the soldiers were well away, then he slowly released his breath and rested his elbows on his knees. His hands were trembling slightly.
Christopher Paolini

Except you be fed with the grapes of Love you shall no be filled with the wine of
Understanding. ~ Mikhail Naimy