Quotes from John Steinbeck

Cal considered. "What did my father do to make her leave?" "He loved her with his whole mind and body. He gave her everything he could imagine.

They's scandalous things goes on in this here camp,'' she said darkly. "Ever' Sat'dy night they's dancin', an' not only squar' dancin', neither. They's some does clutch-an'-hug dancin'! I seen 'em.

laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death

They say a clean cut heals soonest. There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.

And to Kino the secret melody of the maybe pearl broke clear and beautiful, rich and warm and lovely, glowing and gloating and triumphant.

And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don't like it very much. Dora

I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters.

You think it was a sin to let my wife die like that?'' "Well,'' said Casy, "for anybody else it was a mistake, but if you think it was a sin—then it's a sin. A fella builds his own sins right up from the groun'.

Even Juan laughed then. Everyone laughed. And suddenly the bus was not full of strangers. Some chemical association was formed. Norma laughed hysterically. All the tension of the morning came out in her laughter.

Money does not change sickness, only the symptoms.

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.

When a man is finally boxed and he has no choice, he begins to decorate his box. So Hazel, condemned to the presidency, since he could not escape it, began to ornament it. A man can climb high on the steps of responsibility.

You come back a changed man. Samuel, you don't change him. He changes you. I can see the look of him in your face." "Have you thought of the two little boys, Liza?" he asked. "I've thought of your

Will Hamilton was a very substantial businessman. No one knew exactly how many pies his thumb had explored, but it was known that he was a clever and comparatively rich man.

Alice retired to the background until she was barely visible at all.

Catherine was clever, but even a clever woman misses some of the strange corridors in a man.

He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.

You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money.

Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.

Pre-Cambrian Memory.

It had become his custom, each time he was deserted, to buy a gallon of wine, to stretch out on the comfortably hard bunk and get drunk. Sometimes he cried a little all by himself but it was luxurious stuff and he usually had a wonderful feeling of well-being from it. He would read Rimbaud aloud with a very bad accent, marveling the while at his fluid speech.

A blanket of herring clouds was rolling in from the east.

People moving [...] Movin' cause they got to [...] Movin' cause they want sompin better'n what they got. An' that's the on'y way they'll ever git it.