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Quotes About Love

I don't know where being a servant came into disrepute. It is the refuge of a philosopher, the food of the lazy, and, properly carried out, it is a position of power, even of love.
~ John Steinbeck
Aron said slowly. "I wouldn't want to know that. I'd like to know why you do it. You're always at something. I just wonder why you do it. I wonder what's it good for." A pain pierced Cal's heart. His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him. He knew that his brother had found him out. And he felt a longing for Aron to love him. He felt lost and hungry and he didn't know what to do.
~ John Steinbeck
The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods.
~ John Steinbeck
I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.
~ John Steinbeck
I'm glad there's love here. That's all.
~ John Steinbeck
The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe
~ John Steinbeck
Abra looked at his sunny hair, tight-curled now, and at the eyes that seemed so near to tears, and she felt the longing and itching burn in her chest that is the beginning of love. Also, she wanted to touch Aron, and she did. She put her hand on his arm and felt him shiver under her fingers.
~ John Steinbeck
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. —Steinbeck Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
~ John Steinbeck
Love and fighting, and a little wine. Then you are always young, always happy.
~ John Steinbeck
Captain Loft believed that all women fall in love with a uniform and he did not see how it could be otherwise.
~ John Steinbeck
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layer of frailty men want to be good and want be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.
~ John Steinbeck
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.
~ John Steinbeck
And all their love was thinned with money.
~ John Steinbeck
It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist.
~ John Steinbeck
A man so hurt and so perplexed may turn in anger, even on people he loves.
~ John Steinbeck
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.
~ John Steinbeck
And in our time, when a man dies--if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments--the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?--which is another way of putting Croesus's question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?
~ John Steinbeck
I love you," I said. And I do. I really do. And I remember thinking what a hell of a man a man could become.
~ John Steinbeck
That man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.
~ John Steinbeck
My darling looks like a little girl when she awakens. You couldn't think she is the mother of two big brats. And her skin has a lovely smell, like new-cut grass, the most cozy and comforting odor I know.
~ John Steinbeck
In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry," . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.
~ John Steinbeck
I knew from combat that casualties are the victims of a process, not of anger nor of hate or cruelty. And I believe that in the moment of acceptance, between winner and loser, between killer and killed, there is love.
~ John Steinbeck
Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
~ John Steinbeck
It was his first experience with this kind of love and it nearly killed him.
~ John Steinbeck