Quotes from John Steinbeck

Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well.

Why don't you go on west to California? There's work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there?

But you can't start over, Only a baby can start over. You and me, Why, we're all that's been.

Some day, his mind said, that boy would know what things were in the books and what things were not.

I do love her, and that's odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else.

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

To determine to go and to say it was to be halfway there

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 possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

He smiled at her as a man might smile at a memory.

The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience.

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

They could get it, Doc said. They could ruin their lives and get money. Mack has qualities of genius. They're all very clever if they want something. They just know the nature of things too well to be caught in wanting.

It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight.

In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

I eat stories like grapes.

The remarkable thing," said Doc, "isn't that they put their tails up in the air—the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we'd probably be praying—so maybe they're praying.

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.

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

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

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

No gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.

An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie