Quotes from John Steinbeck

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property

People are only interested in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen…a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.

After a while," said Cyrus, "you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever—a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.

Two features would be with her always. Her chin was firm and her mouth was as sweet as a flower and very wide and pink. Her hazel eyes were sharp and intelligent and completely fearless.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris

Look, Samuel, I mean to make a garden of my land. Remember my name is Adam. So far I've had no Eden, let alone been driven out." "It's the best reason I ever heard for making a garden," Samuel exclaimed. He chuckled.

Maybe you've tumbled a world for me. And I don't know what I can build in my world's place.

A man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.

Possibly the deep feeling is that if people learn to eat one another the food supply would be so generous and so available that no one would be either safe or hungry.

That is the way it is done, the way it has always been done. Frogs have every right to expect it will always be done that way.

Behind him hobbled Granma, who had survived only because she was as mean as her husband. She had held her own with a shrill ferocious religiosity that was as lecherous and as savage as anything Grampa could offer. . . As she walked she hiked her Mother Hubbard up to her knees, and she bleated her shrill terrible war cry: Pu-raise Gawd fur vittory.

Her self was an island.

It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well.

You don't seem like the same man." "I'm not. Maybe nobody is, for long.

Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else.

Kino escuchó el leve romper de las olas de la mañana en la playa. Era estupendo...Kino volvió a cerrar los ojos y atendió a su música interior. Quiza sólo él hiciera eso, y quizá lo hiciera toda su gente. Los suyos habían sido una vez grandes creadores de canciones, hasta el punto de que todo lo que veían o pensaban o hacían u oían, se convertía en canción...

The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves—smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that molded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.

Words pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.

You have defied not the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the whole way of life, and I am afraid for you

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.

How pure he is, how unfit for a world that even she knew more about than he did. A dragon killer, he was, a rescuer of damsels, and his small sins seemed so great to him that he felt unfit and unseemly.