John Steinbeck Quotes
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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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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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Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
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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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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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To be alive at all is to have scars.
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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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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
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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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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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'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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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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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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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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Time is the only critic without ambition.
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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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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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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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Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
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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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He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
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… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.