Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn’t.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— John Steinbeck

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

412. “It’s hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.”

— John Steinbeck

413. “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

414. “Curley’s wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks and reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head and her lips were parted.”

— John Steinbeck

415. “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

416. “It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.”

— John Steinbeck

417. “Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

419. “There was a huge moon over the western mountains, and it made the city seem even more mysterious and old, and the great black castle on the ridge stood out in front of the moon. And if there are ghosts anyplace in the world, they must be here, and if there is a ghost of Queen Tamara, she must have been walking the ridge in the moonlight that night.”

— John Steinbeck

420. “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

421. “Once Adam had remarked on the quiet splendor of Lee’s clothes, and Lee had grinned at him. “I have to do it,” he said. “One must be very rich to dress as badly as you do. The poor are forced to dress well.”

— John Steinbeck

422. “Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

426. “It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”

— John Steinbeck

427. “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

428. “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

429. “Her dark eyes made little reflected stars. She was looking at him as she was always looking.”

— John Steinbeck

430. “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

431. “These too are of a burning color – not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.”

— John Steinbeck

432. “There can’t be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it? What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn’t be a Christmas.”

— John Steinbeck

433. “Difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I.”

— John Steinbeck

434. “To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

436. “Maybe – maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure – never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself?”

— John Steinbeck

437. “Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

439. “The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”

— John Steinbeck

440. “Well, I remember this girl. I am not whole without her. I am not alive without her. When she was with me I was more alive than I have ever been, and not only when she was pleasant either. Even when we were fighting I was whole.”

— John Steinbeck

441. “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

442. “Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.”

— John Steinbeck

443. “Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”

— John Steinbeck

444. “The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Strong Quotes

445. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

446. “In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.”

— John Steinbeck

447. “Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.”

— John Steinbeck

448. “The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.”

— John Steinbeck

449. “Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”

— John Steinbeck

450. “Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.”

— John Steinbeck