Quotes from William Souder

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

It happens. Life (or death) taps you on the shoulder, interrupts what you're doing, and suddenly you find that nobody has been bothering you but yourself.

And in the end, Jody again has his pony—but at the terrible cost of learning even the most wondrous gifts are sometimes impermanent.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.

He had been "drunken" on their rhythms. But now his mind had gone silent, and sitting alone with nothing to do in his remote cabin, all seemed lost. The wind rattled at the door. "It is sad," Steinbeck said in closing, "when the snow is falling.

For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

The Steinbeck house was full of books, and as John's sister Beth recalled, "The choice was ours." Some years later Steinbeck reckoned that the books he immersed himself in as a boy were "realer than experience." He didn't remember them as books, but as "something that happened to me.

We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.… This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.

What the critics saw from book to book—but failed to detect as a linkage among all of them—was Steinbeck's anger. He was America's most pissed-off writer. "All his work," Gray wrote, "steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed, and brutality.

When a farm or a family is stricken, nature destroys what humankind has made. Houses peel and crumble. Tilled fields are subsumed by weeds and grasses. Well-tended orchards become knotted, spectral forests. The earth, given an opening, always reclaims itself and obliterates order—erasing the outward evidence of an agrarian society.

By failing to observe and understand groups, we fail to see how the world actually works and instead find ourselves surrounded by "meaningless, unrelated and destructive phenomena." It's arguable that in In Dubious Battle Steinbeck's point about crowds was that the only way to understand them is to watch them and see how they behave—to, as Doc Burton puts it, see the superorganism in action.