John Steinbeck
...men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.Collection: Fighting
I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner's legs are in America - a ridiculous situation.Collection: Travel
I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.Collection: Sitting Still
Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work. That's the way it comes out. And that's the only way it does.Collection: One Day
Socialism never took root in America.Collection: Roots
In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.Collection: Nature
In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.Collection: Kings
You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.Collection: Differences
If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.Collection: Wrath
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.Collection: Dream
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.Collection: Men
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Wrath
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.Collection: People
Fella says today, 'Depression is over. I seen a jackrabbit, an' they wasn't nobody after him.' An' another fella says, 'That aint the reason. Can't afford to kill jackrabbits no more. Catch 'em and milk 'em an' turn 'em loose. One you seen prob'ly gone dry.Collection: Gone
A fallow field is a sin.Collection: Hard Work
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.Collection: Mountain
No one knows my ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.Collection: Way
People do not want advice - they want corroboration.Collection: Life
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.Collection: Running
We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights - the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.Collection: Country
We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Criticism
The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine.Collection: Artist
For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Men
A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.Collection: Texas
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.Collection: Men
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the worldCollection: Guy
A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.Collection: Men
A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.Collection: Inspirational
And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.Collection: Men
There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.Collection: Kindness
One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.Collection: Animal
It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.Collection: Luck
Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good -- Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music.Collection: Beach
Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages.Collection: Grateful
He never fell, never slipped back, never flew.Collection: Flew
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.Collection: Sweet
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962Collection: Responsibility
The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.Collection: Science
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.Collection: Country
To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.Collection: Monsters
We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields?Collection: Children
Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?Collection: Baby
So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.Collection: Lovely
He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.Collection: Too Much
I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.Collection: Book
Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.Collection: Texas