Quotes from John Steinbeck

My darling looks like a little girl when she awakens. You couldn't think she is the mother of two big brats. And her skin has a lovely smell, like new-cut grass, the most cozy and comforting odor I know.

You can't hate men if you know them.

It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

In the souls of people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. I'm scared.

I thought that once an angry and disgusted God poured molten fire from a crucible to destroy or to purify his little handiwork of mud. I thought I had inherited both the scars of the fire and the impurities which made the fire necessary—all inherited, I thought. All inherited. Do you feel that way?

The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable.

This one will be shrewd, I think, and shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.

Everyone gets well if he waits around.

Things do not change with a change of scene.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco "the City". Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is "city". Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197

When you been in stir a little while, you can smell a question comin' from hell to breakfast.

He had drawn a derogatory statement from George. He felt safe now.

No matter how weak and negative a good man is, he has as many sins on him as he can bear.

One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

Help him, Adam--help him. Give him his chance. Let him be free. That's all a man has over the beasts. Free him! Bless him!

the technique must be learned the way I learned it, by failures

What branch do you want to go in?" "I don' give a god-damn," said Pilon jauntily. "I guess we need men like you in the infantry." And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. "Where do you want to go?" "I want to go home," Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too.

I intended to make it sound guileless and rather sweet but you will see in it the little blades of social criticism without which no book is worth a fart in hell.

Quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.

THE SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.

And when one of our successful men had what he needed or wanted, he reassumed his virtue as easily as changing his shirt, and for all one could see, he took no hurt from his derelictions, always assuming that he didn't get caught.

Ale já se takovejch moc pÄ›knejch vÄ›cí bojím.

There can't be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it? What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn't be a Christmas.