Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2022 Update)
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201. “Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.”

— John Steinbeck

202. “When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he’s gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.”

— John Steinbeck

203. “Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.”

— John Steinbeck

204. “Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.”

— John Steinbeck

205. “I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments.”

— John Steinbeck

206. “The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.”

— John Steinbeck

207. “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

208. “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.”

— John Steinbeck

209. “Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Reading Quotes

210. “And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living.”

— John Steinbeck

211. “Luck or tragedy, some people get runs. Then of course there are those who divide it even, good and bad, but we never hear of them. Such a life doesn’t demand attention. Only the people who get the good or bad runs.”

— John Steinbeck

212. “The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can’t take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes

213. “I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.”

— John Steinbeck

214. “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.”

— John Steinbeck

215. “Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.”

— John Steinbeck

216. “How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive?”

— John Steinbeck

217. “A good writer always works at the impossible.”

— John Steinbeck

218. “One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.”

— John Steinbeck

219. “When the fair gold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little fingers pulling a frog mouth at her.”

— John Steinbeck

220. “With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.”

— John Steinbeck

221. “Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.”

— John Steinbeck

222. “That is a great mystery,” said Doctor Winter. “That is a mystery that has disturbed rulers all over the world – how the people know. It disturbs the invaders now, I am told, how news runs through censorships, how the truth of things fights free of control. It is a great mystery.”

— John Steinbeck

223. “The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes

224. “Timshel- thou mayest.”

— John Steinbeck

225. “In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.”

— John Steinbeck

226. “Things that happen are of no importance. But from everything that happens, there is a lesson to be learned.”

— John Steinbeck

227. “The power of an attitude is amazing.”

— John Steinbeck

228. “Stories have haunted us and followed us from our beginning,” Samuel said. “We carry them along with us like invisible tails – the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel. And I don’t understand either of them. I don’t understand them at all but I feel them.”

— John Steinbeck

229. “With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.”

— John Steinbeck

230. “You can’t slice up morals.”

— John Steinbeck

231. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

— John Steinbeck

232. “Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.”

— John Steinbeck

233. “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes, Country Quotes

234. “We know what we got, and we don’t care whether you know it or not.”

— John Steinbeck

235. “When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”

— John Steinbeck

236. “The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.”

— John Steinbeck

237. “In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.”

— John Steinbeck

238. “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

— John Steinbeck

239. “I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn’t mean no harm, George.”

— John Steinbeck

240. “You know what it is? San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.”

— John Steinbeck

241. “If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.”

— John Steinbeck

242. “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man – and the Word is with Men.”

— John Steinbeck

243. “The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.”

— John Steinbeck

244. “People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.”

— John Steinbeck

245. “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes

246. “A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.”

— John Steinbeck

247. “Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.”

— John Steinbeck

248. “I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.”

— John Steinbeck

249. “Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!”

— John Steinbeck

250. “I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.”

— John Steinbeck