John Steinbeck Quotes: 29

• I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

  The Winter of Our Discontent

• Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

  Of Mice and Men

• There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

  The Grapes of Wrath

• I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

  East of Eden

• All great and precious things are lonely.

  East of Eden

• Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

• What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

  Travels with Charley: In Search of America

• I guess there are never enough books.

  A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia

• There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

  East of Eden

• It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

  Cannery Row

• It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

  East of Eden

• Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

• A man without words is a man without thought.

  East of Eden

• If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

• Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.

  The Grapes of Wrath

• Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.

  The Grapes of Wrath

• Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.

  Of Mice and Men

• When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

  Travels with Charley: In Search of America

• Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

• Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

• Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.

  East of Eden

• As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

  East of Eden

• You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.

  The Grapes of Wrath

• Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

  The Winter of Our Discontent

• Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

  Cannery Row

• Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.

  The Winter of Our Discontent

• Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.

  East of Eden

• Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

• I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

  The Grapes of Wrath