Quotes from John Steinbeck

Noah the first-born, tall and strange, walking always with a wondering look on his face, calm and puzzled. He had never been angry in his life. He looked in wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people look at the insane.

We are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins.

If you want to give me a present-give me a good life. That would be something I could value.

Su sueño del futuro seguía siendo real e indestructible, había dicho «iré» y esto hacía también realidad la partida. Decidir marcharse y decirlo era como estar a medio camino.

I don't care what you do as long as I don't have anything to do with it. I guess no matter how weak and negative a good man is, he has as many sins on him as he can bear. I have enough sins to trouble me. Maybe they aren't very fine sins compared to some, but, the way I feel, they're all I can take care of. Please forgive me.

If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I'll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain. . . . If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.

Dessie was not beautiful. Perhaps she wasn't even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it.

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind—the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.

The law was designed to save, not to destroy

The surface of the earth crusted. A thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red contry and white in the gray contry. (1) This describes the form of the book how the earth has been swallowed by the sun and allows you to assume that the farms are destroded.

Then Samuel died and the world shattered like a dish.

Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with a few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.

and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing. I never understood it. Do you?" "Maybe we think out of a different background," said Lee. "I remember that this story was written by and for a shepherd people. They were not farmers. Wouldn't the god of shepherds find a fat lamb more valuable than a sheaf of barley? A sacrifice must be the best and most.

The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

Tom Joad lays it out: ... A fella ain't got a soul of his own - just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody …

Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them.

And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. 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. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And

No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.

I wonder about people who say they haven't time to think. [...] Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

The group, the herd, which is any collection of children.

That mini heart attack you have when you realize you tipped your chair back just a little too far.

The winter seemed reluctant to let go its bite. It hung on cold and wet and windy long after its time. And people repeated, It's those damned big guns they're shooting off in France-- spoiling the weather in the whole world.