John Steinbeck Quotes
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Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
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Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
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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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'It has always seemed strange to me,' said Doc. 'The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.'
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Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
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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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'What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.'
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Time is the only critic without ambition.
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I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
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A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
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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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To be alive at all is to have scars.
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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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'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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He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
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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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Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
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These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.
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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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Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.
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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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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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… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.
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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?