John Steinbeck - East of Eden (1952)

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Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

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
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
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

John Steinbeck
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

John Steinbeck
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

John Steinbeck
A man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

John Steinbeck
And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.

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

John Steinbeck
Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant.

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
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

John Steinbeck
The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.

John Steinbeck
Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

John Steinbeck
You must not expect to find that people understand what they do.

John Steinbeck
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.... The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

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

John Steinbeck