John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

John Steinbeck
There's that fallow land, and here beside me is that fallow man. It seems a waste.

John Steinbeck
It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.

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

John Steinbeck
Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

John Steinbeck
It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.

John Steinbeck
Her father was frightened by a strange bed or a foreign language or a political party he didn't belong to. Her father truly believed that the Democratic party was a subversive organization whose design would destroy the United States and put it in the hands of bearded communists.

John Steinbeck
And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

John Steinbeck
You must not expect to find that people understand what they do.

John Steinbeck
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

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
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.

John Steinbeck
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

John Steinbeck
Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

John Steinbeck
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

John Steinbeck
But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and more precious.

John Steinbeck
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.

John Steinbeck
They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.

John Steinbeck
A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.

John Steinbeck
A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.

John Steinbeck
No gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.

John Steinbeck
And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.

John Steinbeck
A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

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