John Steinbeck - Time Quotes

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Time is the only critic without ambition.

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
The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

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
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.

John Steinbeck
I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

John Steinbeck
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

John Steinbeck
In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence — but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

John Steinbeck
I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.

John Steinbeck
The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.

John Steinbeck
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

John Steinbeck
For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

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
There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party.

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

John Steinbeck
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.

John Steinbeck
Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.

John Steinbeck
It's all fine to say, Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget —and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

John Steinbeck
It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

John Steinbeck
He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.

John Steinbeck
You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

John Steinbeck
I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

John Steinbeck
Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

John Steinbeck
'I know,' said Winter, 'but they don't know.' And he went on with a thought he had been having. 'A time-minded people,' he said, 'and the time is nearly up. They think that just because they have only one leader and one head, we are all like that. They know that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people; we have as many heads as we have people, and in a time of need leaders pop up among us like mushrooms.'

John Steinbeck
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

John Steinbeck