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John Steinbeck Quotes
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John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature.During his writing career, he authored 33 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row , the multi-generation epic East of Eden , and the novellas Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony . The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. February 1902 – 20. December 1968   •   Other names John Ernst Steinbeck
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John Steinbeck: 366   quotes 33   likes

John Steinbeck Quotes

“Mordeen said: "I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think."”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Mordeen on her love for Joe Saul in Act One: The Circus
Burning Bright (1950)

Love , Wisdom , People , World

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Secret , Thinking , Reading

“Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

George; "buck" here means to work at lifting and throwing the sacks of barley
Of Mice and Men (1937)

God

“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”

John Steinbeck

As quoted by John Kenneth Galbraith in the Introduction to The Affluent Society (1977 edition)

Courage

“Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.”

John Steinbeck

Pt. 4
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

War , Game , Football , Despair

“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.”

John Steinbeck book Sweet Thursday

Sweet Thursday (1954)

Love , Hunger , Time

“All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Men

“The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Men , Time

“A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Hope , Hurt

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

John Steinbeck

Pt. 3
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life , Water , Change , Sun

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. [Opening sentence. ]”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Cannery Row (1945)

Dreams , Nostalgia , Light

“I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Friend Ed to Joe Saul in Act Three, Scene I: The Sea
Burning Bright (1950)

Love , Men , Understanding , Sense

“Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Thinking , Time

“When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.”

John Steinbeck

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

“Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Success

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”

John Steinbeck

"...like captured fireflies" (1955); also published in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (2003), p. 142

Art , Teachers

“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.”

John Steinbeck book Sweet Thursday

Source: Sweet Thursday (1954), Ch. 36

Life , Pain , Lie , Sleep

“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.”

John Steinbeck

“In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

Stupidity

“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

“A crime is something someone else commits.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

“A powerful, big-stomached man came into the bunkhouse.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

Source: Of Mice and Men (1937), Ch. 2, p. 35

“In the dusk I saw her smile, that incredible female smile. It is called wisdom but it isn't that but rather an understanding that makes wisdom unnecessary.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Understanding , Smile , Wisdom

“Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

Housing , Children , Age

“A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”

John Steinbeck book Journal of a Novel

From a letter to Pascal Covici (1952)
Journal of a Novel (1969)

Flowers , Books , Sun , Beauty

“I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should be almost able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story.”

John Steinbeck book Journal of a Novel

March 7, 1951
Journal of a Novel (1969)

Perfection , Books