Top 100 John Steinbeck Quotes
#2. I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don't need ... Stuff settin' out there, you jus' feel like buyin' it whether you need it or not.
-Uncle John
John Steinbeck
#4. It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.
John Steinbeck
#5. Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind.
John Steinbeck
#6. I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
John Steinbeck
#7. I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's
why.
John Steinbeck
#8. Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
John Steinbeck
#9. The sea lions felt it and their barking took on a tone and a cadence that would have gladdened the heart of St. Francis. Little girls
John Steinbeck
#10. When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
John Steinbeck
#12. And Ma smiled sadly, He is. Tommy's growed way up - way up so I can't get aholt of 'im sometimes.
John Steinbeck
#13. When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.
John Steinbeck
#14. It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division.
John Steinbeck
#17. 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
#18. There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
John Steinbeck
#20. It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.
John Steinbeck
#21. I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.
John Steinbeck
#22. Somehow they felt they were living in a moment when history pauses and takes stock and changes course.
John Steinbeck
#23. Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses - the whole world over his fence.
John Steinbeck
#24. A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength ... When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.
John Steinbeck
#25. I've never been content to pass a stone without looking under it. And it is a black disappointment to me that I can never see the far side of the moon.
John Steinbeck
#26. How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him
he has known a fear beyond every other.
John Steinbeck
#28. In a bitter night, a mustard night that was last night, a good thought came and the dark was sweetened when the day sat down. And this thought went from evening star to the late dipper on the edge of the first light
that our betters spoke of.
John Steinbeck
#29. There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party.
John Steinbeck
#30. I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.
John Steinbeck
#31. Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
John Steinbeck
#32. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
John Steinbeck
#33. We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
John Steinbeck
#34. If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves.
John Steinbeck
#35. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.
John Steinbeck
#36. Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children. The
John Steinbeck
#37. Lee carried a tin lantern to light the way, for it was one of those clear early winter nights when the sky riots with stars and the earth seems doubly dark because of them.
John Steinbeck
#38. And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don't like it very much. Dora
John Steinbeck
#40. A man who gets few letters does not open one lightly.
John Steinbeck
#41. They knew that a man so hurt and so perplexed may turn in anger, even on people he loves. They left the men alone to figure and to wonder in the dust. After
John Steinbeck
#42. I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.
John Steinbeck
#43. There can't be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it? What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn't be a Christmas.
John Steinbeck
#44. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.
John Steinbeck
#45. When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.
John Steinbeck
#46. You know what it is? San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.
John Steinbeck
#48. They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin.
John Steinbeck
#49. The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
John Steinbeck
#51. It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.
John Steinbeck
#52. I'm in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it.
John Steinbeck
#53. I have seen too many men go down, and I never permit myself to forget that one day, through accident or under the charge of a younger, stronger knight, I too will go down.
John Steinbeck
#54. Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
John Steinbeck
#55. Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over ...
John Steinbeck
#56. In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.
John Steinbeck
#57. You have defied not the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the whole way of life, and I am afraid for you
John Steinbeck
#59. But she was also bewilderingly lonely ... Abra had lost her gift for being alone.
John Steinbeck
#61. There is no loneliness like that of one who can only give and no anger like that of those who only receive and hate the weight of debt.
John Steinbeck
#62. Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
John Steinbeck
#63. She controlled her face and whipped the fear from it. You're just doing it because you're honest, is that it? You're just too sugar sweet to live.
John Steinbeck
#64. I should have known [ ... ] I am the rain. [ ... ] I am the land [ ... ] and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.
John Steinbeck
#66. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
John Steinbeck
#67. How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
John Steinbeck
#68. But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.
John Steinbeck
#69. Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.
John Steinbeck
#71. A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.
John Steinbeck
#73. The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold onto this illusion, even though he knows it's not true.
John Steinbeck
#74. It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn't know anything was spoiled or independent.
John Steinbeck
#75. Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked.
'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
John Steinbeck
#76. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.
John Steinbeck
#77. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror
John Steinbeck
#79. A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.
John Steinbeck
#80. 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
#81. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
John Steinbeck
#82. And in the eyes of the people there is the failure; 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.
John Steinbeck
#83. How do I know?" said Cal. "Am I supposed to look after him?
John Steinbeck
#84. The preacher rose high on his elbow. "Law changes," he said, "but 'got to's' go on. You got the right to do what you got to do.
John Steinbeck
#85. Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.
John Steinbeck
#87. American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.
John Steinbeck
#88. Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
John Steinbeck
#89. The winter seemed reluctant to let go its bite. It hung on cold and wet and windy long after its time. And people repeated, It's those damned big guns they're shooting off in France
spoiling the weather in the whole world.
John Steinbeck
#90. Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time." Her
John Steinbeck
#91. Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.
John Steinbeck
#93. At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally sure that every one of his stories was true.
John Steinbeck
#94. He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.
John Steinbeck
#95. 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
#96. External reality has a way of being not so external after all.
John Steinbeck
#97. Can you hear me, Father? Can you understand me?" The eyes did not change or move. "I did it,"
Cal cried. "I'm responsible for Aron's death and for your sickness. I took him to Kate's. I showed him
his mother. That's why he went away. I don't want to do bad things - but I do them.
John Steinbeck
#98. Tiny emerged on deck some hours later, shaken but smiling. He said that what he had been considering love had turned out to be simple flatulence. He said he wished all his romantic problems could be solved as easily.
John Steinbeck
#99. They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.
John Steinbeck
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