Quotes from John Steinbeck

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

The church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the little theater.

You know pretty well that I don't think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can't reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates.

He raged at his farm, forced it, added to it, drilled and trimmed, and his boundaries extended. He took no rest, no recreation, and he became rich without pleasure and respected without friends.

Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn't discontent the lever of change?

Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth.

You can't make a general rule of it, because sometimes it flops, but mostly a guy that tries to scare you is

Most people don't read the details. It's the details that astonish me.

don't mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don't want to get nibbled to death. There's a difference.

the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

kind of warm silence.

The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon. The

Eventlessness has no post to drape duration on.

Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water.- Buddha was also a hobo who paid no attention to the other hobo.- Chief Rain-In-The-Face, weirder even.-

And here he was, a big, fat, grown-up whoremaster, leaning his stomach against his desk while his cheeks darkened with blood and excited chills ran up his legs and thighs.

He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it.

They just know the nature of things too well to be caught in that wanting.

Only when everything else failed did a good sheriff make an arrest. The best sheriff was not the best fighter but the best diplomat.

Hate cannot live alone.

The families learned what rights must be observed—the right of privacy in the tent; the right to keep the past black hidden in the heart; the right to talk and to listen; the right to refuse help or to accept, to offer help or to decline it; the right of son to court and daughter to be courted; the right of the hungry to be fed; the rights of the pregnant and the sick to transcend all other rights.

green with little golden spots.

But it isn't silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance tuns outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

Samuel's funeral and the talk with Kate should have made Adam sad and bitter, but they did not.