Quotes from John Steinbeck

A crop raised--why, that makes ownership. Land hoed and the carrots eaten--a man might fight for land he's taken food from. Get him off quick! He'll think he owns it. He might even die fighting for the little plot among the Jimson weed.

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

Una ciudad se parece mucho a un animal. Tiene un sistema nervioso, una cabeza, unos hombros y unos pies. Está separada de las otras ciudades, de tal modo que no existen dos idénticas. Y es además un todo emocional.

You want I should drive twenty miles because I got roots?

The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist and wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life.

Cathy was fourteen when she entered high school. She had always been precious to her parents, but with her entrance into the rarities of algebra and Latin she climbed into clouds where her parents could not follow. They had lost her.

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back.

And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn't true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody's brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn't save us.

They was havin' the time a their life, an' same time you wouldn' give a gopher for their chance.'' Casy said, "Seems like that's the way. Fella havin' fun, he don't give a damn; but a fella mean an' lonely an' old an' disappointed—he's scared of dyin'!

And Samuel could remember hearing of a cousin of his mother's in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the world who loved him. "There's a capacity for appetite," Samuel said, "that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy.

Suddenly he knew joy and sorrow felted into one fabric. Courage and fear were one thing too.

When you're a child you're the centre of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you're your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It's worse, but it's much better too.

It has always seemed strange to me that it is usually men like Adam who have to do the soldiering. He did not like fighting to start with, and far from learning to love it, as some men do, he felt an increasing revulsion for violence.

But a good servant, and I am an excellent one, can completely control his master, tell him what to think, how to act, whom to marry, when to divorce, reduce him to terror as a discipline, or distribute happiness to him, and finally be mentioned in his will.

Such men are rare now, but in the nineties there were many of them, wandering men, lonely men, who wanted it that way. Some of them ran from responsibilities and some felt driven out of society by injustice. They worked a little, but not for long. They stole a little, but only food and occasionally needed garments from a wash line. They were all kinds of men–literate men and ignorant men, clean men and dirty men–but all of them had restlessness in common.

Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money- unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime. p.19

Und keine Frau lässt sich gern vom Mittelpunkt der Bühne verdrängen, schon gar nicht durch einen Tintenfisch.

The martinis came, not in little glasses but big as bird baths with twists of lemon peel. The first taste bit like a vampire bat, made its little anesthesia, and after that the drink mellowed and toward the bottom turned downright good.

No," he said, "that's not my right. Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain.

My body was prickly with fear sweat as I lay in the gathering morning light and listened to the slender spindles of malice whining away in the distance. i thought how that shudder was under the skin of everybody in the world, not in the mind, deep under the skin. It's not the jets so much as what their purpose is.

Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing

He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA

Oh, strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch! And