“He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row”

“When he heard the sounds of his mother, a mother he had never known, crying like an animal in the damp grass, Joseph whispered to his father. “Row,” he whispered, “row us away from here.”

“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”

“He never forgot what he learned and that was to love is to destroy and to be love is to be the one destroyed.”

“[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”