“You can’t slice up morals.”
— John Steinbeck
“Crooks avoided the whole subject now. “Maybe you guys better go,” he said. “I ain’t sure I want you in here no more. A colored man got to have some rights even if he don’t like ’em.”
“With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.”
“Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully.”
“But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there.”
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.”
“The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.”
“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?”
“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.”
“We know what we got, and we don’t care whether you know it or not.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”
“The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
“There is nothing in the world like the first taste of beer.”
“If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.”
“Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.”
“I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn’t mean no harm, George.”
“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.”
“You know what it is? San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.”
“People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.”
“Must hunger become anger and anger fury before anything will be done?”
“It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.”
“I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.”
“No one who is young is ever going to be old.”
“We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.”
“Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”
“It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.”
“I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.”
“All we got is the family unbroke.”
“Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now – look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.”
“I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.”
“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”
“You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.”
“This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.”
“Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.”
“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”
“Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
“It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.”
“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
“With a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.”
“Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”
“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”
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