Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

304. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

306. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

310. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

313. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

315. “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

316. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

318. “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

319. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

322. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

325. “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

326. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

328. “Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”

— John Steinbeck

329. “No one who is young is ever going to be old.”

— John Steinbeck

330. “Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”

— John Steinbeck

331. “For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”

— John Steinbeck

332. “A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?”

— John Steinbeck

333. “I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”

— John Steinbeck

334. “Lennie said quietly, “It ain’t no lie. We’re gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’.”

— John Steinbeck

335. “All we got is the family unbroke.”

— John Steinbeck

336. “Abra was ready ere I called her name. And though I called another, Abra came.”

— John Steinbeck

337. “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”

— John Steinbeck

338. “I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”

— John Steinbeck

339. “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love... We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

— John Steinbeck

340. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

341. “We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.”

— John Steinbeck

342. “There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.”

— John Steinbeck

343. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

344. “Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”

— John Steinbeck

345. “We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”

— John Steinbeck

346. “You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

— John Steinbeck

347. “Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.”

— John Steinbeck

348. “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re pound-in’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.”

— John Steinbeck

349. “Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.”

— John Steinbeck

350. “And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.”

— John Steinbeck