John Steinbeck Quotes
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Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
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Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.
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What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no pants rabbits.
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What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.
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There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
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And now, our submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
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What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
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This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
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The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
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The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
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What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.
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If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces...Merlin replies...So it would; so it will ... then the pieces will be put together again by such as destroyed it.
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'I'm sorry,' Ethan said. 'You have taught me something - maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logical. I know now where to get the money to start my fortune.'
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The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
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He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.
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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is - and a woman too, I guess.
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They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. 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.
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It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
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A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities-never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
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It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place - everyone must have one, although I have never heard of a man tell of it.
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The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
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I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
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Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.
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My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.