John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

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
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

John Steinbeck
Some forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate the things we hold good.

John Steinbeck
That's why I'm talking to you. 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
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.

John Steinbeck
We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not.

John Steinbeck
When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted - that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong: maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong." - Muley

John Steinbeck
Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas, when it happened, it was one day hooked on to the tail of another.

John Steinbeck
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.' 'We take a beatin' all the time.' 'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.

John Steinbeck
People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments...

John Steinbeck
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