John Steinbeck: Quotes about people

John Steinbeck was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on people.
John Steinbeck: 732 quotes33 likes

“I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Variant: I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
Source: East of Eden

“He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

“There are some times… when the love for people is strong and warm like a sorrow.”

John Steinbeck book To a God Unknown

Source: To a God Unknown

“As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

“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.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

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

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

“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.”

John Steinbeck book The Pearl

Source: The Pearl

“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.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

“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.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”

John Steinbeck book Once There Was a War

Source: Once There Was a War

“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”

John Steinbeck

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

“Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

About Bernice Pritchard in Ch. 5
The Wayward Bus (1947)

“Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 3

“They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)