“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
“A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.”
“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
“An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.”
“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
“Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.”
“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”
“Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.”
“And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.”
“Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”
“A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory.”
“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.”
“Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
“Why don’t you go on west to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there’s always some kind of crop to work in. Why don’t you go there?”
“I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe. – John Steinbeck.”
“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”
“Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.”
“Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create – this is man.”
“Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
“There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.”
“You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
“Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
“Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”
“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”
“In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.”
“The human is the only guilty animal.”
“Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.”
“The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.”
“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”
“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”
“The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine.”
“Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.”
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.”
“People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments...”
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”
“His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.”
“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.”
“Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”
“Man has a choice and it’s a choice that makes him a man.”
“I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.”
“He said, “I am a man,” and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.”
“There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.”
“A man without words is a man without thought.”
“Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.”
“Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.”
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