John Steinbeck

“Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.”

“And Ma smiled sadly, "He is. Tommy's growed way up - way up so I can't get aholt of 'im sometimes.”

“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.”

“You're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. And more - you'll see - you're buying bitterness.”

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms”

“When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

“The thing that give me the mos' trouble was, it didn't make no sense. You don't look for no sense when lightnin' kill a cow, or it comes up a lood. That's jus' the way things is. But when a bunch of men take an' lock you up four years, it ought to have some meaning. Men is supposed to think things out. Here they put me in an' keep me an' feed me four years. That ought to either make me so I won't do her again or else punish me so I'll be afraid to do her again”

“Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.”

“The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.”

“And the girl,' Lanser continued, 'the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her--that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.”

“I'm tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.”

“Defeat is a momentary thing. A defeat doesn't last. We were defeated and now we attack. Defeat means nothing. Can't you understand that? Do you know what they are whispering behind doors?”

“Lanser said, "There are no peaceful people, when will you learn it? There are no friendly people, can't you understand that?”

“In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was.”

“He tried not to think what he knew--that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.”

“Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”

“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.”

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and he strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”

“A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.”

“The only good writer was a dead writer.”

“The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.”

“In the bathroom two water tumblers were sealed in cellophane sacks with the words: "These glasses are sterilized for your protection." Across the toilet seat a strip of paper bore the message: "This seat has been sterilized with ultraviolet light for your protection." Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible.”

“...um homem tem de ter qualquer coisa a que se ligue, qualquer coisa que ele possa estar certo de encontrar lá de manhã.”

“There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy”

“The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.”

“I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers.”

“It is not true as is romantically presumed that people frightened or injured or persecuted are wakeful. More often than not they retire into sleep to be free of trouble for a time.”

“The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.”

“Perhaps it is so with everyone, that he looks for weakness in the strong to find promise of strength in his weakness.”

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

“...and it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes, those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by an ogreish professional hostess. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as it's end product.”

“A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete”

“Do you believe that a man in need can call soundlessly to another?""Perhaps, my lord. It has happened to me that thinking of a friend and meeting him are connected. But does thinking draw him or his coming draw the thought?”

“I am grieved at what you tell me," said Pellinore, "but I believe that God can change destiny. I must have faith in that.”

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”

“Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.”

“Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”

“They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.”

“Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.”

“A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?”

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”

“Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.”

“In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck trough the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning...Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.”

“I ain't sayin' I'm like Jesus," the preacher went on. "But I got tired like Him, an' I got mixed up like Him, an' I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin' stuff. Nighttime I'd lay on my back an' look up at the stars; morning I'd set an' watch the sun come up; midday I'd look out from a hill at the rollin' dry country; evenin' I'd foller the sun down. Sometimes I'd pray like I always done. On'y I couldn' figure out what I was prayin' to or for. There was the hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing was holy...An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin', it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, and' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' and draggin' and fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, no one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang -- that's right, that's holy. An' then I got to thinkin' I don't even know what I mean by holy...I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all.”

“It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary”

“Ale já se takovejch moc pěknejch věcí bojím.”

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

“If a man ordered a beer milkshake he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known.”

“Hazel grew up - did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn't learn a thing in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn't pay enough attention.”

“Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and turn it into wisdom. His mind had no horizon - and his sympathy had no warp. He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood. He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement. He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell. Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, 'I really must do something nice for Doc.”