Top 697 Quotes & Sayings by John Steinbeck - Page 6

Courage and fear were one thing too.

But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.

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?

I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.

On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.

Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.

What good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world - temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.

I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.

But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and more precious.

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other. . .

The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.

No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time--he can never return to simplicity.

Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won't all be poor.

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.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.

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.

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

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

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.

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.

Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.

Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.

I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner's legs are in America - a ridiculous situation.

I nearly always write — just as I nearly always breathe.

An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.

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

Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

Intention, good or bad, is not enough.

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

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? You only truly, deeply appreciate and are grateful for something when you compare and contrast it to something worse.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

New York is a wonderful city... It is going to be the capital of the world.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

It don't cost money to ask.

Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work. That's the way it comes out. And that's the only way it does.

I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness overwhelms me and I don't know what's the matter. That is, I know but I won't admit it. I'm just tired from writing. As you get older, writing becomes harder. By that I mean you see so many more potentialities. Things like transition used to trouble me. But not any more. When I say it's harder, I'm not talking about facility. You learn all the so-called tricks, but then you don't want to use them.

I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.

...men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.

It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.

I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.

The land is so much more than its analysis.

for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.

Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.

In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.

I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.