Quotes from John Steinbeck

Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

Someone's got to do these things,' he said sullenly. 'Or else fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.

You can't make a race horse of a pig. No, said Samuel, but you can make a very fast pig.

If there is no God, no devil, no heaven, no hell then therefore there are no rules.

You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

And the hatred was deep in the eyes of the people, beneath the surface.

We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn't know anything was spoiled or independent.

I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

There's a passage in John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" that does a pretty good job describing California's rainfall patterns: The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ...

My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness.

You're not clever. You don't know what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other people walk over you. Sometimes I think you're a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does that answer your question? I love you better. I always have.

It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin.

Maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills.

He's got a can up there,' Richard said.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

I guess she's just nuts,' he said. 'And if she's nuts, a guy's got to do nuts things. You don't think you could say the hell with her?

Guy knows all about women he don't know nothing about a woman.

In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counter word in English. It is the verb vascular, present participle vacilando. I does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not her gets there, although he has direction. . . We could choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.

Anybody can break down. It takes a [real] man not to.

And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

When you see good or bad in your children, you're seeing what you instilled in them after they cleared the womb.