John Steinbeck Quotes

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“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”

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

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.”

“It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”

“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”

“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.”

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

“A man without words is a man without thought.”

“You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”

“Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”

“Perhaps it takes courage to raise children..”

“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”

“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”

“.. it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world… It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.”

“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

“Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans”

“You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff”

“Don't make everyone know about your sadness.”

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”

“The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.”

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”

“… and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

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

“I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”

“Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.”

“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

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

“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?”

“Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.”

“He never fell,
never slipped back,
never flew.”

“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”

“Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em.”

“Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.”

“Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.”

“Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.”

“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

“There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.”

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”

“Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.”

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”

“I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”

“Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.”

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”

“I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.”