Top 100 Steinbeck John Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind.
John Steinbeck
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.
John Steinbeck
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
John Steinbeck
#14. Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
John Steinbeck
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
#20. 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
#22. A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
#23. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. and you can't leave a thing like that.
John Steinbeck
#25. 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
#26. Tom said, "Let me beg you never to tell that story to Will. He'd have you locked up." "But the house wasn't worth what I asked!" "I repeat what I said about Will. What's Adam want with your house?" "He's going to move there. Wants the twins to go to school in Salinas." "What'll
John Steinbeck
#27. In his middle life, at about the time such things were known about, it was discovered that, he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.
John Steinbeck
#28. Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
John Steinbeck
#29. You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.
John Steinbeck
#30. Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.
John Steinbeck
#31. Parents took honor from a daughter who was a teacher.
John Steinbeck
#32. I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's
why.
John Steinbeck
#33. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
John Steinbeck
#34. 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
#35. Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.
John Steinbeck
#36. Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.
John Steinbeck
#37. It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin.
John Steinbeck
#38. In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind
but he must get there first.
John Steinbeck
#39. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.
John Steinbeck
#40. And what could be more frightening than a child with total power? A spear and sword are terrible, God knows. That is why the knight who carries them is first taught pity, justice, mercy, and only last
force.
John Steinbeck
#41. No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
John Steinbeck
#42. With all the polls and opinions posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other ...
John Steinbeck
#43. It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.
John Steinbeck
#44. 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
#45. Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.
John Steinbeck
#46. This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
John Steinbeck
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.
John Steinbeck
#50. With knowledge there is no hope, ... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.
John Steinbeck
#54. 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
#55. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.
John Steinbeck
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. It's hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.
John Steinbeck
#60. Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
John Steinbeck
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.
John Steinbeck
#73. I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.
John Steinbeck
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sunk beneath the ground.
John Steinbeck
#81. Joseph habitually scowled at furniture, expecting it to be impertinent, mischievous, or dusty.
John Steinbeck
#82. 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
#83. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
John Steinbeck
#84. Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
John Steinbeck
#85. What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft ... a kind of breaking through to glory.
John Steinbeck
#86. He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA,
John Steinbeck
#87. 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
#89. 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
#91. He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
#92. Laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death,
John Steinbeck
#94. 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
#95. I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
John Steinbeck
#96. Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.
John Steinbeck
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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