John Steinbeck

“Man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. - in a letter to George Albee”

“Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.”

“That was a time when a man had the right to be burried by his own son an' a son had the right to burry his own father.”

“You was always too busy pullen' little girls' pigtails when I give you the Holy Sperit.”

“Gonna cuss an' swear an' here the poetry of folks talkin'.”

“Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.”

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.”

“Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.”

“Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?”

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.”

“Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?”

“Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.”

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”

“I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.”

“Life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it.”

“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

“Sure, cried the tenant men,but it’s our land…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 ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.""We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.""Yes, but the bank is only made of men.""No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were. If you saw one you'll know what I mean. Remember after all the cape work when the bull tries to kill something that isn't there? Remember how he gets confused and uneasy, sometimes just stands and looks for an answer? Well, then they have to give him a horse or his heart will break. He has to get his horns into something solid or his spirit dies. Well, I'm that horse. And that's the kind of men I get, confused and puzzled. If they can get a horn into me, that's a little triumph.”

“People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.”

“Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.”

“Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and their vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph--only a kind of disgusted pity.”

“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”

“I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”

“Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.”

“Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.”

“Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...”

“There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.”

“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.”

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

“There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.”

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”

“To the heavens on the wings of a pig.”

“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”

“She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.”

“But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”

“Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.”

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”

“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.”

“A man without words is a man without thought.”

“Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.”

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”

“Maybe you've tumbled a world for me. And I don't know what I can build in my world's place.”

“It's like a life--so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.”

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”