John Steinbeck Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.

John Steinbeck
I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

John Steinbeck
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.

John Steinbeck