John Steinbeck Quotes

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“No one wants advice, only corroboration.”

“Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.”

“You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.”

“For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.”

“Guys like us got nothing to look ahead to.”

“And her joy was nearly like sorrow.”

“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”

“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”

“Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.”

“They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.”

“I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.”

“He said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.”

“The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.”

“If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.”

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

“For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

“The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.”

“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.”

“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.”

“Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.”

“I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.”

“For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”

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

“If you want to keep a friend, never test him.”

“A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.”

“Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?”

“So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.”

“Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”

“[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.”

“It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”

“Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.”

“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it and it's usually crucifixion.”

“Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”

“You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

“It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary”

“Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight - the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards”

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”

“At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.”

“A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.”

“Life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it.”

“Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.”

“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.”

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

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. […]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”

“I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.”

“He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.”

“She knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near.”