Quotes from John Steinbeck

And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.

Whenever they's a fight so hungry hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there.

Here you play in the street, little chicken. Some day an automobile will run over you; and if it kills you, that will be the best thing that can happen. It may only break your leg or your wing. Then all of your life you will drag along in misery. Life is too hard for you, little bird.

Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses—the whole world over his fence.

His mind had no horizon—and his sympathy had no warp.

I don't want advice.' 'Nobody does. It's a giver's present.

No one wants advice--only corroboration.

Mostly I'm too damn busy to know how I feel.

In the souls of the people The Grapes of Wrath are Filling and Growing Heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. Happy 112th Birthday John Steinbeck.

Work is the only good thing.

Why did his mind pick its way as delicately as a cat through cactus?

I don't mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don't want to get nibbled to death. There's a difference.

He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.

Do you take pride in your hurt?" Samuel asked. "Does it make you seem large and tragic?" "I don't know." "Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eves the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

Suppose it were true—Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Lee laughed to himself—now this second will, and Aron, whose purity was a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and the balance was re-established?

Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.

And don't worry about losing. If i is right, it happens - the main thing is not to hurry.Nothing good gets away.

I am grieved at what you tell me, said Pellinore, but I believe that God can change destiny. I must have faith in that.

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something.

And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more. They knew the buyer man would get much more, but they didn't know how to do it. Merchandising was a secret to them.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.

O]nly Colonel Lanser knew what war really is in the long run . . . and he tried not to think what he knew--that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for a new weariness and new hatreds.