John Steinbeck
There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.Collection: Condescension And
Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.Collection: Air
What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.Collection: People
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.Collection: Travel
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.Collection: Men
I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Benefits
Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?Collection: Cat
You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.Collection: Boast
Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.Collection: Texas
Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.Collection: Life
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.Collection: Confusion
Don't make everyone know about your sadness.Collection: Sadness
I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.Collection: Differences
And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.Collection: Hurt
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.Collection: Get Well
The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.Collection: Years
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.Collection: Life
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.Collection: Men
To the heavens on the wings of a pig.Collection: Pigs
Look now — in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst sin we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, 'Use it well, use it wisely.' We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.Collection: Brother
We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not.Collection: Care
If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known.Collection: Beer
You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business. They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.Collection: Lying
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'.Collection: Lying
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.' 'We take a beatin' all the time.' 'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Dog
George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.Collection: Voice
Lennie begged, "Le's do it now. Le's get that place now." "Sure right now. I gotta. We gotta.Collection: Lennie
Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.Collection: Dog
I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.Collection: Mean
We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.Collection: Guilt
Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?Collection: Done
Sir, this is a unique dog. He does not live by tooth or fang. He respects the right of cats to be cats although he doesn't admire them. He turns his steps rather than disturb an earnest caterpillar. His greatest fear is that someone will point out a rabbit and suggest that he chase it. This is a dog of peace and tranquility.Collection: Friendship
And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.Collection: Hands
'He's got a can up there,' Richard said.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Real
Why don't you go on west to California? There's work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there?Collection: California
When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.Collection: Children
They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)Collection: Dark
Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.Collection: Morning
At one point, as Samuel urges Adam to raise his boys well regardless of the blood that might be in them, Adam tells him, "You can't make a race horse of a pig." Samuel replies, "No, but you can make a very fast pig.Collection: Horse
The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.Collection: Giving Up
Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.Collection: Prayer
But 'Thou mayest!'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and winCollection: Brother
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.Collection: Love
If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away.Collection: Anger
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.Collection: Lying