John Steinbeck Quotes (251 Quotes)

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

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.

He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.

Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?

She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.

These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

You're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. And more - you'll see - you're buying bitterness.

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.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

My father said she was a strong woman, and I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

In town in a whorehouse. That's where your money's goin'. 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.

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.

A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities-never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.

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.

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.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

To the stars, on the wings of a pig.

We could live offa the fatta the lan'.

Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.

And in his dream, Coyotito was reading from a book as large as a house, with letters as big as dogs, and the words galloped and played on the book.

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.

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.

I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.

Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.

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?

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.

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar - if he is financially fortunate.

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

All we got is the family unbroke.

That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.