A Quote by John Steinbeck

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?

John Steinbeck

Quote Topics

Baby Bones Box Broke Chick Chickens Cross Egg Episcopal Ever Had Little Malleable Noticed Out Put Roughly Say Shape Shaped Small Soft Strange Then Took Way

Quote Author

John Steinbeck
American - Author
February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968

I really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.

Mia Wasikowska

The magazines drive me insane, because it's such an unrealistic ideology, that you're going to have a baby, or even just be out of shape for a little while, and then ping back into shape.

Denise Lewis

[On peanut M&Ms:] It is the eggness of them. A shell, chocolate placenta, proteiny peanut baby. Life shape, birth shape, cell shape, protoplasmic-ooze shape. A shape that calls straight through civilization to our reptilian brains.

Cynthia Heimel

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in.

Erma Bombeck

When I started modeling, I was definitely heavier. I was quite voluptuous in fact. I had a real baby face and baby fat. But I was a baby! I was told I had to get into better shape, but I'm quite stubborn so I didn't.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

the test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.

Nancy Mitford

One Christmas Eve I was made to eat a thing the person who cooked it called 'caram-egg' - which was basically uncooked egg in the shape of a cowpat with the tiniest hint of caramel.

Nick Mohammed

Last but not least, I would say you should have big dreams, full dreams, not half dreams. You know, it's very simple. You can't put a large box in a small box. Well, you cannot put a full life in a small dream box.

Elias Zerhouni

I took a cookery course. On the examination, I had to cook a cheese omelet with peas and an egg custard. With the egg custard, which was supposed to be a dessert, I forget to put the sugar in, so that's more of a quiche, isn't it?

Lesley Nicol

You never count your chickens before they hatch. I used to keep parakeets and I never counted every egg thinking I would get all eight birds. You just hoped they came out of the nest box looking all right. I'm like a swan at the moment. I look fine on top of the water but under the water my little legs are going mad.

Ian Holloway

People like to put you a box. I've always been the wrong shape. Maybe you are, too. I think all the people who are wrong shapes for boxes should go out and march into the streets singing, 'We are the shapes! We don't fit the box.'

Noel Fielding

Having a baby isn't so bad. If you're a female Emperor penguin in the Antarctic. She lays the egg, rolls it over to the father, then takes off for warmer weather where she eats and eats and eats. For two months, the father stands stiff, without food, blind in the 24-hour dark, balancing the egg on his feet. After the little penguin is hatched, the mother sees fit to come home.

L. M. Boyd

I see you young and soft oh little baby Little feet, little hands, little baby One year of crying and the words creep up inside Creep into your mind So much to say

Dave Matthews

Before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving on the chaos until its breath had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its month--emblem of eternity in its spiritual and of our world in its physical sense.