Quotes from John Steinbeck

I'll want to hear," Samuel said. "I eat stories like grapes.

The times, the moment, demanded that I slaughter human beings and I did." "That was wartime and for your country." "It's always some kind of time.

Isn't it funny, my two pet horrors, incapacity and ledgers and they both hit at once. I write columns of figures in big ledgers and after about three hours of it I am so stupefied that I can't get down to my own work. I can see very readily how office workers get the way they are. There is something soddenly hypnotic about the columns of figures.

I like to pet nice things with my fingers

Having broken out of his own Spartanism, he

kind of tough on you divin' and drinkin'. Got to.

I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple.

Los seres humanos tienen a veces más ponzoña que las serpientes.

think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only—and that note unchanging sorrow.

It captured the light and refined it and gave it back in silver incandescence

Down towards one end of the village, among the small houses, a dog complained about the cold and the loneliness. He raised his nose to his god and gave a long and fulsome account of the state of the world as it applied to him. He was a practiced singer with a full bell throat and great versatility of range and control.

Cuando un hombre dice que no quiere hablar de algo, suele significar generalmente que no puede pensar en nada más.

Mice and Men is a compact and, in its origin, a highly personal response to the powerlessness of the California laboring class

The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air.

We're proud to help,'' said Wilson. "We're beholden to you,'' said Pa. "There's no beholden in a time of dying,'' said Wilson, and Sairy echoed him, "Never no beholden.

Omul este singurul parazit care-È™i preg?teÈ™te capcana, îi pune momeala, apoi calc? de bun?voie în ea.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.

Hay ciertos individuos que a veces, sin merecerlo en absoluto, son elegidos de los dioses. Lo obtienen todo sin el menor esfuerzo

All of these years I've cheated Liza. I've given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I've saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I'll never know that. I think she would maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

No," said George. "No, Lennie. I ain't mad. I never been mad, an' I ain't now. That's a thing I want ya to know.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

The turntable drops down and the record swings into its place in the pile. The purple light goes off. The nickel, which has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play—this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. This nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.

And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because 'Thou mayest.