Quotes from John Steinbeck

Everyone has to be an orphan some time.

It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror

Tiny emerged on deck some hours later, shaken but smiling. He said that what he had been considering love had turned out to be simple flatulence. He said he wished all his romantic problems could be solved as easily.

t]here ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.

Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can't allow a question to weaken it.

Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching a cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts will not satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn't discontent the lever of change?

Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.

Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton)

They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That's for civilians.

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep.

The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it - the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight and there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table when a book was moved.

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

And is usually true of a man of one idea, [Charles] became obsessed.

It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation; he had no resistance to it at all.

Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop.

Please try not to need me. That's the worst bait of all to a lonely man.

If he considered God at all, he thought of Him as an old and honored general, retired and gray, living among remembered battles and putting wreaths on the graves of his lieutenants several times a year.

That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

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.

A man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn't known—they might call the police.

The bird looked much smaller dead than alive. Jody felt a little mean pain in his stomach, so he took out his pocketknife and cut off the bird's head. Then he disemboweled it, and took off its wings; and finally he threw all the pieces into the brush. He didn't care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion.

I'll tell ya one thing -- the jail house is jus' a kind a way a drivin' a guy slowly nuts. See? An' they go nuts, an' you see 'em an' hear 'em, an' pretty soon you don' know if you're nuts or not. When they get to screamin' in the night sometimes you think it's you doin' the screamin'--an' sometimes it is.