John Steinbeck: Trending quotes (page 18)

John Steinbeck trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
John Steinbeck: 732   quotes 33   likes

“If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces…[Merlin replies]…So it would; so it will … then the pieces will be put together again by such as destroyed it.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Men , World , Religion

“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.”

John Steinbeck

Pt. 1
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Thinking

“I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me [that I wanted to be a writer]—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I'm sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me.”

John Steinbeck

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 45 (1969)

Life , Parent , Loyalty

“I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

Source: Of Mice and Men (1937), Ch. 4, p. 75

Guy

“For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from.”

John Steinbeck

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 45 (1969)

People , Hell , Fight

“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.”

John Steinbeck

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Love , Children , Time , Housing

“A man is a lonely thing.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), unplaced by chapter

“This is the law. The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplementary.”

John Steinbeck

King Arthur and his Noble Knights (1976)

Fight , Victory , Law

“Can you disbelieve in something you don't know about?[…] It isn't that I don't believe but that I don't know.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part One, Chapter V

“I have known many people to ask for advice but very few who wanted it and none who followed it.”

John Steinbeck book The Short Reign of Pippin IV

The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)

People

“It is a matter of disillusion to young male Americans otherwise informed, to discover that the French are a moral people — judged, that is, by American country-club standards.”

John Steinbeck book The Short Reign of Pippin IV

The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)

Country , People

“The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part Two, Chapter XIX

“Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis (25 July 1959)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Dreams , People , Reality

“Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Chase Horton (8 June 1959)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

“An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (20 April 1959)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Light

“One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (14 March 1958)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Communication , Understanding , Knowledge , Thinking

“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Merlin to King Arthur in "The Death of Merlin"
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Feeling , Wisdom

“Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Introduction
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

People , Learning , Reading , Success