John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.

John Steinbeck
It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

John Steinbeck
… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.

John Steinbeck
The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.

John Steinbeck
I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

John Steinbeck
It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.

John Steinbeck
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

John Steinbeck
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

John Steinbeck
Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

John Steinbeck
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

John Steinbeck
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.

John Steinbeck
The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.

John Steinbeck
When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.

John Steinbeck
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.

John Steinbeck
A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

John Steinbeck
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

John Steinbeck
The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.

John Steinbeck
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

John Steinbeck
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

John Steinbeck
My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other...

John Steinbeck
It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

John Steinbeck
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

John Steinbeck
Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.

John Steinbeck
The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

John Steinbeck
The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

John Steinbeck
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

John Steinbeck
In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.

John Steinbeck
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

John Steinbeck
I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

John Steinbeck
No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe

John Steinbeck