Quotes from John Steinbeck

It's a thing to see when a boy comes home.

Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.

Her shame and fierceness were blended.

For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events t give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.

At night frantic men walked boldly to hen roosts and carried off the squawking chickens. If they were shot at, they did not run, but splashed sullenly away; and if they were hit, they sank tiredly in the mud.

Sure I got sins. Ever'body got sins. A sin is somepin you ain't sure about. Them people that's sure about ever'thing an' ain't got no sin-- well, with that kind a son-of-a-bitch, if I was God I'd kick their ass right outa heaven! I couldn' stand 'em!

Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.

He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk. But watch it, mister. There's a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses - so beautiful - a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower, some day. We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there'll be none of us to save you.

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

He had said, I am a man, and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and halfgod

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.

Courage and fear were one thing too.

For how can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

We have in past been forced into reluctant change by weather, calamity, and plague. Now the pressure comes from our biologic success as a species. We have overcome all enemies but ourselves.

A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. ... When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.

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?

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 guess a man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it.

If then this tendency toward collectivization is a mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better. It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles—a tendency that can end only in extinction.

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

Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. [ Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech ]