John Steinbeck Quotes
-
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.
-
What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no pants rabbits.
-
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.
-
There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
-
Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.
-
And now, our submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
-
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.
-
'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.'
-
A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
-
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you got two new people. Maybe that means - hell, it's complicated.
-
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.
-
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
-
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
-
Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.
-
What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.
-
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.
-
He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.
-
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am a dog.
-
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.
-
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is - and a woman too, I guess.