Quotes from John Steinbeck

The honest preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred, boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns.

Oh, I guess I'm physically able to father a child. That's not what I'm thinking. I'm too closely married to a quiet reading lamp.

She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes.

It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.

And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.

Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon—and his sympathy had no warp.

The flies have conquered the flypaper

I suppose you think I am going to give you one of those 'You are going out into the world' speeches. Well, you are perfectly right. You are going out into the world and it is a mess, a frightened, neurotic, gibbering mess. And there isn't anyone out there to help you because all the people who are already out there are in a worse state than you are, because they have been there longer and a good number of them have given up.

Swedes up in Dakota—know what they do sometimes? Put pepper on the floor. Gits up the ladies' skirts an' makes 'em purty lively—lively as a filly in season. Swedes do that sometimes." In

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: 'Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.

I've heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man & the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second! ~ East of Eden

It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.

Give a little party," she insisted. "Just a small affair. Nobody will dress. It's the anniversary of the founding of the Bloomer League—you didn't even remember that." "It's no use," said Tom.

O sa ai necazuri, spuse bacanul. -E necesar din cand in cand, zise Fauna. Ca sa te simti intr-adevar bine, trebuie sa fii fraier macar o data in viata.

Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make.

In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time.

The smell of azaleas and the sleepy smell of sun working with chlorophyll filled the air.

Doc, spuse Fauna, am vazut de toate in viata mea. Crede-ma, daca ai ceva de doamna in tine, iti strici toata viata.

It's because I've stopped seeing. When that happens you think you'll never see again.

there must be a saturation point and the progress may be a progression toward strangulation.

You can boast about anything if it's all you have

One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

Git, Ma said. They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.