Top 100 Quotes About John Steinbeck
#1. This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men's room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn't play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes.
Eddie Condon
#2. When you get to readin' about where the music and John Steinbeck and all those people like that come from, the further you go the more interesting it becomes.
Merle Haggard
#3. Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.
Tom Robbins
#4. A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
John Steinbeck
#5. 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
#6. How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
John Steinbeck
#7. I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
#8. So I did indeed set out, as John Steinbeck says in his gavels with Charley, "not to instruct others but to inform myself.
Dennis Bray
#9. 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
#10. My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.
Thomas Steinbeck
#11. You didn't grow up in the shadow of John Steinbeck. He put you on his shoulders and gave you all the light you wanted.
Thomas Steinbeck
#12. I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?
Edward Norton
#13. Time is the only critic without ambition - John Steinbeck
Moll Molone
#14. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes.
Tom Robbins
#15. I just want people to finish the book and say, 'I was entertained.' When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it.
Marv Levy
#16. Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
Tom Shales
#17. The choices one makes, not one's blood, determine one's destiny - John Steinbeck
Laxmi Hariharan
#18. I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
Jay Parini
#19. I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus III
#20. One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck's journals while he was writing 'East of Eden,' which was so cool.
Paul Dano
#21. I'm a writer. These people are American nomads, forever on the move, trying to feed themselves and their families. I'm thinking about writing a book about them. My name is John Steinbeck. Perhaps you've heard of me." After
Homer Hickam
#22. For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.
John Steinbeck
#23. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.
John Steinbeck
#24. I don't think they's luck or bad luck. On'y one thing in this worl' I'm sure of, an' that's I'm sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella's life. He got to do it all hisself. Help him, maybe, but not tell him what to do.
John Steinbeck
#25. I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.
John Steinbeck
#26. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.
John Steinbeck
#27. Now Kino lay in the cave entrance, his chin braced on his crossed arms, and he watched the blue shadow of the mountain move out across the brushy desert below until it reached the Gulf, and the long twilight of the shadow was over the land.
John Steinbeck
#28. It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
John Steinbeck
#29. The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
John Steinbeck
#31. Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.
John Steinbeck
#32. I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
John Steinbeck
#33. 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
#35. I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.
John Steinbeck
#36. I don't think I've ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that's negative.
John Steinbeck
#37. I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now
only that place where the books are kept.
John Steinbeck
#38. Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
John Steinbeck
#39. It's hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.
John Steinbeck
#41. When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.
John Steinbeck
#42. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.
John Steinbeck
#43. What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you're trying to identify?Are you looking at little things to avoid big things?
John Steinbeck
#47. I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.
John Steinbeck
#48. But it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
John Steinbeck
#49. Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred.
John Steinbeck
#50. A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.
John Steinbeck
#51. Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.
John Steinbeck
#52. I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
John Steinbeck
#53. Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.
John Steinbeck
#55. Laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death,
John Steinbeck
#56. He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
#58. The preacher said, "She looks tar'd.' "Women's always tar'd,' said Tom. "That's just the way women is, 'cept at meetin' once an' again.
John Steinbeck
#60. Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now
look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
John Steinbeck
#61. He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA,
John Steinbeck
#62. What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft ... a kind of breaking through to glory.
John Steinbeck
#63. Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
John Steinbeck
#64. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
John Steinbeck
#65. He had good children and he raised them fine. All doing well -maybe except Joe ... they're talking about sending him to college, but all the rest are fine.
John Steinbeck
#66. Joseph habitually scowled at furniture, expecting it to be impertinent, mischievous, or dusty.
John Steinbeck
#67. In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sunk beneath the ground.
John Steinbeck
#68. My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
John Steinbeck
#69. Think you've got knocker fever. Come in to the inn tonight and get it cured up." "Maybe that's it," said Adam. "But I never took much satisfaction in a whore." "It's all the same," Charles said. "You shut your eyes and you can't tell the difference.
John Steinbeck
#70. You've never had a quick jump in the hay in your life."
"I could learn, maybe."
"You couldn't fornicate if you wanted to."
"I could try."
"It would take love or hatred to arouse you, and either one would require a slow and stately procedure.
John Steinbeck
#71. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.
John Steinbeck
#72. It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates himself.
John Steinbeck
#74. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. and you can't leave a thing like that.
John Steinbeck
#75. A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
#77. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.
John Steinbeck
#79. It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
#80. It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!
John Steinbeck
#81. I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.
John Steinbeck
#82. 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
#83. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
John Steinbeck
#84. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
John Steinbeck
#85. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
John Steinbeck
#87. I know this - a man got to do what he got to do, I can't tell you. I don't think they's luck or bad luck. On'y one thing in the worl' I'm sure of, an' that's I'm sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella's life. He got to do it all hisself, Help im, maybe, but not tell him what to do.
John Steinbeck
#89. It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.
John Steinbeck
#90. Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
John Steinbeck
#91. 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
#92. Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind.
John Steinbeck
#93. The dark swallowed him, but his dragging footsteps could be heard a long time after he had gone, footsteps along the road; and a car came by on the highway, and its lights showed the ragged man shuffling along the road, his head hanging down and his hands in the black coat pockets.
John Steinbeck
#94. 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
#95. Now it is over," he said sadly. "Now the great times are done. Thy friends will mourn, but nothing will come of their mourning." Danny
John Steinbeck
#96. Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
John Steinbeck
#97. With knowledge there is no hope, ... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.
John Steinbeck
#98. Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.
John Steinbeck
#99. Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.
John Steinbeck
#100. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
John Steinbeck
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