Quotes from John Steinbeck

For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.

I can just see it all over again. You'll stay around a a year or so and then you'll get restless and you'll make me restless. We'll get mad at each other and then we'll get polite to each other-and that's worse. Then we'll blow up and you'll go away again, and then you'll come back and we'll do it all over again. Adam asked, Don't you want me to stay? Hell yes, said Charles. I miss you when you're not here. But I can see how it's going to be just the same.

um homem tem de ter qualquer coisa a que se ligue, qualquer coisa que ele possa estar certo de encontrar lá de manhã.

a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken.

I tell those stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them. It wasn't Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering.

For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

I'm learnin' one thing good," she said. "Learnin' it all a time, ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help—the only ones.

Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.

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 new weariness and new hatreds.

The frantic summer fishermen who pay a price and glut the decks with fish in the afternoon wonder vaguely what to do with them, sacks and baskets and mountains of porgies and blows and blackfish, sea robins, and even slender dogfish, all to be torn up greedily, to die, and to be thrown back for the waiting gulls. The gulls swarm and wait, knowing the summer fisherman will sicken of their plenty. Who wants to clean and scale a sack of fish? It's harder to give away fish than it is to catch them.

Feed a man, cloth him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.

Joseph habitually scowled at furniture, expecting it to be impertinent, mischievous, or dusty.

There's a part of you missing. Some men can't see the color green, but they may never know they can't. I think you are only a part of a human. I can't do anything about that. But I wonder whether you ever feel that something invisible is all around you. It would be horrible if you knew it was there and couldn't see it or feel it.

I guess this personal hide-and-seek is not unusual. And some people are 'it' all their lives - hopelessly 'it.

It is not true as is romantically presumed that people frightened or injured or persecuted are wakeful. More often than not they retire into sleep to be free of trouble for a time.

Man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. - in a letter to George Albee

And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness.

In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year, it is the comfort that will come in ten years, it is the clothes that will be made very soon. If ever a people took its energy from hope, it is the Russian people.

When Mary is confused or perplexed, she spurts anger the way an octopus spurts ink, and hides in the dark cloud of it.

He said the threshold of insult is in direct relation to intelligence and security.

He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth.

In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry.

Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and their vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph--only a kind of disgusted pity.