Quotes from John Steinbeck

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

Nenhuma tribo selvagem, nenhum invasor foi alguma vez responsável pelas crueldades estúpidas e deliberadas dos alemães, que arrasaram a Ucrânia como crianças cruéis e frenéticas.

And now you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

You got to be awful rich to dress as bad as you do," he said.

W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them. I have all of them, and some are very rare. If I remember correctly, North Dakota printed only eight hundred copies and South Dakota about five hundred. The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.

It wasn't laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn't know anything was spoiled or independent.

All we got is the family unbroke.

Father and son are natural enemies and each is happier and more secure in keeping it that way.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.

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

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.

The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.