Quotes from John Steinbeck

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

Ma put down her head and she fought with a desire to cry.

I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage.

Adam went on, "Every morning in the army that damned bugle would sound. And I swore to God if I ever got out I would sleep till noon every day. And here I get up a half-hour before reveille. Will you tell me, Charles, what in hell we're working for?" "You can't lay in bed and run a farm," said Charles. He stirred the hissing bacon around with a fork.

Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can't keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go--off somewheres. It's like me.

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff.

Bought two quarts of beer for breakfast.

An' Grandpa didn' die tonight. He died the minute you took 'im off the place. You sure a that? Pa cried Why, no. Oh he was breathin', Casy went on, but he was dead. He was that place, an' he knowed it.

Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time." Her

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.

His name was Anderson and he had little gift for communication. Like most technicians, he had a terror and a contempt for speculation.

Jesus, I seen it happen too many times. I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.

When Pharaoh had a dream he called in the experts and they told him how it was and how it would be in the kingdom, and that was right because he was the kingdom. When some of us have a dream, we take it to an expert and he tells us how it is in the country of ourselves. I had a dream that didn't need an expert. Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like a personal triumph to him.

That is all I can think of. If there was more to be answered it is in the stomachs of those khaki-colored devils in the garden. They are eating the fence now. The appetite of a puppy ranks with Grand Canyon for pure stupendousness.

For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism— either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.

No more in life would that face be free of care.

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.

Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live- for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live- for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept...

It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.

help us. She likes to." "It's a long way off—clear across the country." Aron said excitedly, "I know! When we take flowers to our mother we'll take some to our Uncle Charles." And he said a little sadly, "I