“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
— John Steinbeck
“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
“If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.”
“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”
“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
“I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.”
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? You only truly, deeply appreciate and are grateful for something when you compare and contrast it to something worse.”
“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”
“You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.”
“A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.”
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.”
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”
“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
“In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.”
“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
“If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”
“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”
“I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.”
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.”
“The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.”
“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
“The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”
“There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”
“Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.”
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
“Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.”
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”
“I guess there are never enough books.”
“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
“We could live offa the fatta the lan’.”
“One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.”
“I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.”
“To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”
“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.”
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