Quotes from John Steinbeck

Tom bruised himself on the world and licked his cuts.

Adam said, "I bet you couldn't sleep if you stayed in bed. You know what I bet? I bet you get up because you want to, and then you take credit for it—like taking credit for six fingers.

In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry," . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

Your sons have no names." Adam replied, "Their mother left them motherless." "And you have left them fatherless. Can't you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don't you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?" "I didn't do it," Adam said. "Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.

It was a bad day when three or four men were not standing around the forge, listening to Samuel's hammer and his talk. They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

You know, Suzy, they ain't no way in the world to get in trouble by keeping your mouth shut. You look back at every mess you ever got in and you'll find your tongue started it.

Three things will never be believed: the true, the probable, and the logical.

Rosasharn, you're jest one person, an' they's a lot of other folks. You git to your proper place. I knowed people built theirself up with sin till they figgered they was big mean shucks in the sight a the Lord. But, Ma—— No. Jes' shut up an' git to work. You ain't big enough or mean enough to worry God much. An' I'm gonna give you the back a my han' if you don' stop this pickin' at yourself.

A nation may be moved by its statesmen and defined by its military but it's usually remembered for its artists.

There is no loneliness like that of one who can only give and no anger like that of those who only receive and hate the weight of debt.

There's a capacity for appetite," Samuel said, "that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy.

And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?

Awright—take 'im." He did not look down at the dog at all. He lay back on his bunk and crossed his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling. From

My great complaint is that the only possession I carry about with me is a bag of losses. I am the owner solely of the memory of things I used to have. Perhaps it is well--for I seem to love them more now that I have them not.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

I know,' said Winter, 'but they don't know.' And he went on with a thought he had been having. 'A time-minded people,' he said, 'and the time is nearly up. They think that just because they have only one leader and one head, we are all like that. They know that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people; we have as many heads as we have people, and in a time of need leaders pop up among us like mushrooms.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it.

Ever since I lost the spirit, I'd just as soon go one way or the other. I'll go your way.

I knew from combat that casualties are the victims of a process, not of anger nor of hate or cruelty. And I believe that in the moment of acceptance, between winner and loser, between killer and killed, there is love.

Por el grosor del polvo en los libros de una biblioteca pública puede medirse la cultura de un pueblo.

The other night I discovered that 50 feet from our house,through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael's Tor at Glastonbury...There is no question that there is magic here and all kinds of magic. (Bruton 1959)

Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars