John Steinbeck - Years Quotes

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The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

John Steinbeck
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

John Steinbeck
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.

John Steinbeck
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

John Steinbeck
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

John Steinbeck
We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

John Steinbeck
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.

John Steinbeck
The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.

John Steinbeck
I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.

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

John Steinbeck
It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

John Steinbeck
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

John Steinbeck
A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man:

John Steinbeck