John Steinbeck Quotes
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We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
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'I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.'
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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
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You watch your place, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy, it ain't even funny.
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'Well, that glove's fulla vaseline.''Vaseline? What the hell for?'Well, I tell ya what - Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.'
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Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
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The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
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Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Opening sentence.
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A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
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I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.
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Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
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To be alive at all is to have scars.
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Time is the only critic without ambition.
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Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you.
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'Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.'
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I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.
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I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
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Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
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Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
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I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
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Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary - do you hear? Who are you in there?
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He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
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One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: 'Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.'
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… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.