Quotes by John Steinbeck

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.

Thats why Im talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

What makes Capa a great photo journalist? asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. We see his own appetite for life, his mix of urgency with compassion . . . the artistic thrust of his photography always had more to do with its emotional pitch, which remained genuine and deeply felt. Or, in Capas own words, a great picture is a cut out of the whole event which will show more of the real truth of the affair to some one who was not there than the whole scene.

Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I want to hold on to. Thats not true of course - just a feeling like the quick one of hexing your trip so you couldnt go. The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar.

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: After the revolution even we will have more, wont we, dear? Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property

Look out for luck. You cant trus luck.

Well, what you ding this kind of work for--against your own people?Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner--and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day and it comes every day.But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families cant eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?Cant think of that. Got to think of my own kids.***Nearly a hundred people on the road for your three dollars. Where will we go?And that reminds me, you better get out soon. Im going through the dooryard after dinner...I got orders wherever theres a family not moved out--if I have an accident--you know, get too close and cave in the house a little--well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet.I built this with my hands...Its mine. I built it. You bump it down--Ill be in the window with a rifle...Its not me. Theres nothing I can do. Ill lose my job if I dont do it. And look--suppose you kill me? Theyll just hang you, but not long before youre hung therell be another guy on the tractor, and hell bump the house down. Youre not killing the right guy.***Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall and wrenched the house from its foundation so that it fell sideways,crushed like a bug...The tenant man stared after [the tractor], his rifle in his hand. His wife beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.

Moneys easy to make if its money you want. But with few exceptions people dont want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.

Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but its 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 its no good, its still ours. Thats what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.

And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over. But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist—or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.

Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: After the revolution even we will have more, wont we, dear? Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.I guess the trouble was that we didnt have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldnt have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.

Why, Tom - us people will go on livin when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, were the people that live. They aint gonna wipe us out. Why, were 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 aint no good, an they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin. Don you fret none, Tom. A different times comin.

This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk.Maybe both of us have got a piece of him, said Lee. Maybe thats what immortality is.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.An all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless.We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Why are you making no more songs? I said to him in a tone like that. Why are you making no more songs? I have grown to be a man. Only children make songs -- children and idiots. [William the road-mender about Merlin]