Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

353. “For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.”

— John Steinbeck

354. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

356. “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

357. “Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much.”

— John Steinbeck

358. “And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.”

— John Steinbeck

359. “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

360. “Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life – so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

364. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

366. “I don’t know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.”

— John Steinbeck

367. “And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.”

— John Steinbeck

368. “The people don’t like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars. You will find that is so, sir.”

— John Steinbeck

369. “It isn’t like the rest of the country – it is like a nation itself – more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.”

— John Steinbeck

370. “The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.”

— John Steinbeck

371. “But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn’t.”

— John Steinbeck

372. “To hell with that rotten century! Let’s get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It’s a fair thing ahead. There’s no rot on this clean new hundred years. It’s not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years – why, we’ll crucify him head down over a privy.”

— John Steinbeck

373. “Love and fighting, and a little wine. Then you are always young, always happy.”

— John Steinbeck

374. “I hope you know what you’re doing when you issue me a license to talk. I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second.”

— John Steinbeck

375. “There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.”

— John Steinbeck

376. “I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.”

— John Steinbeck

377. “Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much.”

— John Steinbeck

378. “She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.”

— John Steinbeck

379. “No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.”

— John Steinbeck

380. “And of course they were descended from the ancient kings of Ireland, as every Irishman is.”

— John Steinbeck

381. “Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.”

— John Steinbeck

382. “People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”

— John Steinbeck

383. “For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.”

— John Steinbeck

384. “It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”

— John Steinbeck

385. “Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”

— John Steinbeck

386. “A fallow field is a sin.”

— John Steinbeck

387. “Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.”

— John Steinbeck

388. “The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”

— John Steinbeck

389. “I was mean life a wolf. Now i’m mean like a weasel. When you’re huntin’ somepin you’re a hunter, an’ you’re strong. Can’t nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted – that’s different. Somepin happens to you. You ain’t strong; maybe you’re fierce, but you ain’t strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain’t no hunter no more.”

— John Steinbeck

390. “And her joy was nearly like sorrow.”

— John Steinbeck

391. “He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.”

— John Steinbeck

392. “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

— John Steinbeck

393. “For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism – either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

— John Steinbeck

394. “So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.”

— John Steinbeck

395. “This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.”

— John Steinbeck

396. “When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197.”

— John Steinbeck

397. “On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”

— John Steinbeck

398. “Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.”

— John Steinbeck

399. “Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans.”

— John Steinbeck

400. “They’s a time of change, an’ when that comes, dyin’ is a piece of all dyin’, and bearin’ is a piece of all bearin’, an’ bearin’ an’ dyin’ is two pieces of the same thing. An’ then things ain’t lonely any more. An’ then a hurt don’t hurt so bad, ’cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn. I wisht I could tell you so you’d know, but I can’t.’’ And her voice was so soft, so full of love, that tears crowded into Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and flowed over her eyes and blinded her.”

— John Steinbeck