John Steinbeck Quotes

I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.

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.

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.

You stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

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'.

There is comfort in routine.

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.

Saints can spring from any soil.

One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.

But Doc had one mental habit he could not get over. When anyone asked a question, Doc thought he wanted to know the answer.

The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

All we got is the family unbroke.

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him... or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.

There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.

The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

Guys like us got nothing to look ahead to

... every little boy thinks he invented sin.

It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

You never oughta drink water when it ain't runnin'.

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.

Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

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.

The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.

I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.

(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.

Niagara Falls is very nice. I'm very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.

The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.

Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.

The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.

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.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were.

I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.

Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.

Texas is not a state - it's a state of mind.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.

Thou mayest rule over sin.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living.

It is the nature of a person as he/she grows older to protest against change, particularly changes for the better.

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.

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.

...no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.

He said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.

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

He never fell, never slipped back, never flew.