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John Steinbeck Quotes (displaying: 1 - 30 of 697 quotes)

John Steinbeck Quotes
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And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
John Steinbeck
Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
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.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put there faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potential moral units- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coat-tails.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. KNOWING A MAN WELL NEVER LEADS TO HATE and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. TRY TO UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER!
John Steinbeck
Theme:
But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
John Steinbeck
Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.
John Steinbeck
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie
John Steinbeck
Theme:
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he only ought to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
If you're in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help–the only ones.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter...
John Steinbeck
Theme:
People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.
John Steinbeck
You was always too busy pullen' little girls' pigtails when I give you the Holy Sperit.
John Steinbeck
The trees and the muscled mountains are the world? but not the world apart from man? the world and man? the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separeates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.''We take a beatin' all the time.''I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.
John Steinbeck
One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now - why, you can't find all the cards.
John Steinbeck
Theme:
The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.
John Steinbeck