John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

John Steinbeck
Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria.

John Steinbeck
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

John Steinbeck
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.

John Steinbeck
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

John Steinbeck
Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

John Steinbeck
A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

John Steinbeck
My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.

John Steinbeck
I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.

John Steinbeck
When a hypothesis is deeply accepted it becomes a growth which only a kind of surgery can amputate.

John Steinbeck
Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant.

John Steinbeck
I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

John Steinbeck
It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

John Steinbeck
There are good things to see in the tide pools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.

John Steinbeck
I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.

John Steinbeck
In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.

John Steinbeck
Man is related... inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.. [P]lankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

John Steinbeck
Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.

John Steinbeck
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.

John Steinbeck
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

John Steinbeck
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

John Steinbeck
He was an arithmetician rather than a mathematician. None of the humor, the music, or the mysticism of higher mathematics ever entered his head.

John Steinbeck
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

John Steinbeck
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

John Steinbeck
The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.

John Steinbeck
I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.

John Steinbeck
It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

John Steinbeck
A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.

John Steinbeck
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

John Steinbeck
I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.

John Steinbeck