John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

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
But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist-or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.

John Steinbeck
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

John Steinbeck
What do I want in a doctor? Perhaps more than anything else-a friend with special knowledge.

John Steinbeck
Knowledge is a sacred thing, not to be questioned or even inspected.

John Steinbeck
There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.

John Steinbeck
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.

John Steinbeck
I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

John Steinbeck
If I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an' work, an' no trouble.

John Steinbeck
I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.

John Steinbeck
He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.

John Steinbeck
I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener. There you have it. We are not of the same trade at all and so how can your rules fit me?

John Steinbeck
The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

John Steinbeck
One can live in a prefabricated world, smugly and without question, or one can indulge perhaps the greatest human excitement: that of observation to speculation to hypothesis. This is a creative process, probably the highest and most satisfactory we know.

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

John Steinbeck
Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

John Steinbeck
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

John Steinbeck
There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.

John Steinbeck
Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.

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