Quotes from John Steinbeck

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people—we go on.

I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

It isn't like the rest of the country — it is like a nation itself — more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Texas is not a state -- it's a state of mind.

The fields were fruitful and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

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

All great and precious things are lonely.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—'Thou mayest'— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.

I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.