Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

302. “A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by.”

— John Steinbeck

303. “My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.”

— John Steinbeck

304. “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

305. “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

306. “With a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.”

— John Steinbeck

307. “A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.”

— John Steinbeck

308. “No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

310. “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.”

— John Steinbeck

311. “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”

— John Steinbeck

312. “Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

314. “Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.”

— John Steinbeck

315. “Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”

— John Steinbeck

316. “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

317. “All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.”

— John Steinbeck

318. “The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.”

— John Steinbeck

319. “Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Som’thin’ he could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of it.”

— John Steinbeck

320. “Trouble with mice is you always kill ’em.”

— John Steinbeck

321. “And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right – the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.”

— John Steinbeck

322. “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

323. “A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

325. “You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

327. “A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.”

— John Steinbeck

328. “Yeah,” said George. “I’ll come. But listen, Curley. The poor bastard’s nuts. Don’t shoot ‘im. He di’n’t know what he was doin’.”

— John Steinbeck

329. “I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

— John Steinbeck

330. “No – the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy – everything, even me.”

— John Steinbeck

331. “Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.”

— John Steinbeck

332. “A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities – never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”

— John Steinbeck

333. “Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.”

— John Steinbeck

334. “He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row.”

— John Steinbeck

335. “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”

— John Steinbeck

336. “A dog is a bond between strangers.”

— John Steinbeck

337. “Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”

— John Steinbeck

338. “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

339. “He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.”

— John Steinbeck

340. “I’m back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.”

— John Steinbeck

341. “A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.”

— John Steinbeck

342. “Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”

— John Steinbeck

343. “Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him.” He whined, “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya,” he cried, “I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

— John Steinbeck

344. “There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

— John Steinbeck

345. “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

— John Steinbeck

346. “It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.”

— John Steinbeck

347. “And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?”

— 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. “When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

— John Steinbeck

350. “The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.”

— John Steinbeck