John Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent” Quotes (38 Quotes)

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.

Arkana bakma, biri aray? kapat?yor olabilir...

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

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?

Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?

Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

Fark bir kis,idedir, tek bas,?na bir kis,ide... Yegane güç, bir tek sendedir. Bas,ka hiçbir s,eye güvenemezsin.

Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and their vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph--only a kind of disgusted pity.

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.

He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?

Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.

I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.

Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.

I know three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logical

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.

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

The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

I.çimden eve gitmek istiyorum, dedim..

There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.

I.nsan düs,ünerek yas,am?n? yoluna koyabilir mi, yoksa her s,eyi ak?s,?na m? b?rakmal??

There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind--but he must get there first.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.

Intention, good or bad, is not enough.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.