Quotes from John Steinbeck

Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.

THAT YEAR THE RAINS HAD COME so gently that the Salinas River did not overflow. A slender stream twisted back and forth in its broad bed of gray sand, and the water was not milky with silt but clear and pleasant. The willows that grow in the river bed were well leafed, and the wild blackberry vines were thrusting their spiky new shoots along the ground.

Duygularla iliÅŸkili deÄŸilse, sözcükler anlams?zd?r. Ä°nsan bir düÅŸüncenin sonucuna göre mi harekete geçeri yoksa duygu eylemi harekete geçirir de bazen düÅŸünce mi onu uygulamaya döker?

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.

Arkana bakma, biri aray? kapat?yor olabilir...

Why, of course you can go. Aren't you happy here?" "I don't think I've ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that's negative.

His body was as insensitive to pain as was his mind to subtleties.

Onu bir kenara koyarken, anlad???m? söyledim yaln?zca. Ne kötüdür bilirim ama elimden bir ÅŸey gelmez. BaÅŸkas? da sana yard?m edemez. Yaln?zca geçecek diyebilirim ama sen buna inanamazs?n. Yolun aç?k olsun. Bu dönemde birbirimize tahammül edemesek de, sevgim seninle olsun.

And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey--a look of longing. Lord! I wish I could go.

He stared between his knees at the floor. "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.

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.

And when he drove away from his old friends they knew they would not see him again, although he did not say it. He took to gazing at the mountains and the trees, even at faces, as though to memorize them for eternity.

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man.

and the break would never come as long as fear can turn to wrath.

It would be a mistake to name them for qualities we think they have," Samuel said. "We might be wrong—so wrong. Maybe it would be good to give them a high mark to shoot at—a name to live up to. The man I'm named for had his name called clear by the Lord God, and I've been listening all my life. And once or twice I've thought I heard my name called—but not clear, not clear.

No, in Ireland." "And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

Tom Wolfe was right," he reflected. "You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Just think what this land would raise with plenty of water! Why, it will be a frigging garden!

His attention seemed tied to her face by a taut string.

The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did it will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift through his fingertips.The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.

Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not to no murder. You done right. Don't you kill nobody if you can help it.