“He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.”
— 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.”
“I have seen too many men go down, and I never permit myself to forget that one day, through accident or under the charge of a younger, stronger knight, I too will go down.”
“It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.”
“Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.”
“One can’t be happy as I have been for very long. There’s a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.”
“Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.”
“All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas Valley, not poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. Samuel was well pleased with the fruit of his loins.”
“Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn’t important enough to me to be an obsession.”
“The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.”
“For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.”
“I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.”
“We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields?”
“That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.”
“He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.”
“I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.”
“Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.”
“He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.”
“For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.”
“A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.”
“Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”
“Like most modern people, I don’t believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.”
“I climb fences when i got fences to climb.”
“He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I’ve missed this, what else have I failed to see?”
“It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.”
“Teresina went often to confession. She was the despair of Father Ramon. Indeed he had seen that while her knees, her hands, and her lips did penance for an old sin, her modest and provocative eyes, flashing under drawn lashes, laid the foundation for a new one. During.”
“Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.”
“But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.”
“One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.”
“I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner’s legs are in America – a ridiculous situation.”
“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.”
“I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.”
“Courage and fear were one thing too.”
“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous.”
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”
“Not only do the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.”
“I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn’t involved with loss. I didn’t have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.”
“They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren’t so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people’s property.”
“The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn’t occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.”
“It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.”
“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.”
“Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.”
“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”
“The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.”
“Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.”
“It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.”
“I have starved and it isn’t nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.”
“No one knows my ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.”
“One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.”
“I think bullfights are for men who aren’t very brave and wish they were.”
We're on a mission of turning inspiring quotes into beautiful wallpapers. Start your week with a motivational kick. Don't miss out on our next weekly batch.
Join 48,000+ other people and subscribe to Quotefancy Weekly Digest.
