Quotes from John Steinbeck

Eventlessness has no post to drape duration on.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

There are some times...when the love for people is strong and warm like a sorrow.

Then it is better, sir, to love whom one cannot have?" "Probably better," Lancelot said. "Certainly safer.

I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.

But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

We don't take a trip. A trip takes us.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

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.

No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe

He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea.

Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?

[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.