John Steinbeck Quotes
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.
John Steinbeck
Quotes to Explore
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
John Steinbeck
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
'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.'
John Steinbeck
What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck
He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is - and a woman too, I guess.
John Steinbeck