Quotes from John Steinbeck

His body was rearranging itself towards manhood, and he was shaken by the veering winds of adolescence.

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.

By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle drives—the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice work but, given the pattern of the country's development, it had to be done.

We know that--all that. It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster.

Juana, glancing secretly at him, saw him smile. And because they were in some way one thing and one purpose, she smiled with him. And they began this day with hope.

Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.

Când te preg?teÈ™ti mult timp pentru o c?l?torie cred c? nutreÈ™ti gândul intim c? nu se va realiza.

Oare noi actionam ca urmare a gandirii, sau simtirea este aceea care stimuleaza actiunea, si numai uneori gandirea devine motorul actiunii?

It's like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know--because I've got her in me His head was down and his was voice was heartbroken. You've got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn't even be wondering if you didn't have it. Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Whatever you do, it will be you who do it--not your mother.

It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world.

He don't talk like other people. He's an Irishman. And he's all full of plans - a hundred plans a day. And he's all full of hope.

I believe that there is only one story in the world... Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions in their avarice and cruelty and in their kindness and generosity too-- in a net of good and evil. A man after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well or ill?

Our Father who art in nature...must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys.

We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours--being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

The Word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.

sorrow is the mother of a general compassion

When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.

Wisht I knowed what all the sins was, so I could do 'em.

Fella in business got to lie an' cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That's what's important. You go steal that tire an' you're a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.

In all such local tragedies time works like a damp brush on water color. The sharp edges blur, the ache goes out of it, the colors melt together, and from the many separated lines a solid gray emerges.

Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

And the anger began to ferment.

we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.