Quotes by John Steinbeck

You see, I have been at revaluing myself in the last few days. I may have some value to historians because I have destroyed a few things. The builder of your Cathedral is forgotten even now, but I, who burned it, may be remembered for a hundred years or so. And that may mean something or other about mankind.

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutters land, Guerrero s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

She wasnt happy, but then she wasnt unhappy. She wasnt anything. But I dont believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.

Hm-m, he said. Lookie, Ma. I been all day an all night hidin alone. Guess whoI been thinkin about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin what he said, an I can remember-all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an he foun he didn have no soul that was hisn. Says he foun he jus got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness aint no good, cause his little piece of a soul wasnt no good less it was with the rest, an was whole. Funny how I remember. Didnt even think I was listenin. But I know now a fella aint no good alone.

This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layer of frailty men want to be good and want be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.

Humans are caught -- in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too -- in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any chances we may impose of field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I don well -- or ill?

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.

I live alone, he said simply. I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.But you dont believe in them? Doc asked hopefully.I dont find it a matter for belief or disbelief, the seer said. Youve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that its an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Dont you see visions?No, said Doc.

It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America. And then the glaciers moved down and wiped the Titans out beyond recovery. And only these few are left--a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?

It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think youcontrol it.

The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.

Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbours had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.

But you cant start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, were all thats been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, thats us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We cant start again. The bitterness we sold to the junk man - he got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to go, thats us; and when the tractor hit the house, thats us until were dead. To California or any place - every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And some day - the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And theyll all walk together, and therell be a dead terror from it.

...without money you cannot fight money.

Dont you dare take the lazy way. Its too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Dont let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.