Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

256. “But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me – why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

259. “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

260. “Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

262. “You can’t slice up morals.”

— John Steinbeck

263. “They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That’s for civilians.”

— John Steinbeck

264. “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die.”

— John Steinbeck

265. “Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. His violence balanced his tenderness, and himself was a pitted battlefield of his own forces.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

267. “This is the greatest mystery of the human mind – the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.”

— John Steinbeck

268. “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.”

— John Steinbeck

269. “And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

272. “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

273. “It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

275. “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

276. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

278. “There wasn’t any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn’t have room to store his happiness.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

282. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

284. “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

285. “I’m gettin’ tired way past where sleep rests me.”

— John Steinbeck

286. “Don’t roust your faith bird-high an’ you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms.”

— John Steinbeck

287. “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.”

— John Steinbeck

288. “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

289. “We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to thehumans: Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure. No dynamic peoplehas ever survived these dangers.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

291. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

292. “She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I’m jus’ pain covered with skin.”

— John Steinbeck

293. “We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.”

— John Steinbeck

294. “I’m learnin’ one thing good,” she said. “Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”

— John Steinbeck

295. “This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.”

— John Steinbeck

296. “Must hunger become anger and anger fury before anything will be done?”

— John Steinbeck

297. “It’s a thing to see when a boy comes home. It’s a thing to see.”

— John Steinbeck

298. “They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.”

— John Steinbeck

299. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

300. “I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.”

— John Steinbeck