Emilio said, “Someday I too will ride to Monterey for medicine. Did Pepé come to be a man today?”
Mama said wisely, “A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man.”
—John Steinbeck, ‘Flight’
Hell Yes, John Steinbeck
“Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.” —John Steinbeck
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”— John Steinbeck
“ [W]ar is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds. … Tension and excitement, weariness, movement - all merge in one great dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, ‘Yes, I guess that’s how it was.’ ”
John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down (via fortuneandglory)
Real Places in Literature
Doc and his lab from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row were based on Steinbeck’s dear friend Ed Rickett and Rickett’s business, Pacific Biological Laboratories (shown left). The lab still stands today and is a fixture on Cannery Row Avenue in Monterey, CA.
(Image: Holistic Biology)
“ Fine artistic things seem always to be done in the face of difficulties, and the rocky soil, which seems to give the finest flower, is contempt. Don’t fool yourself, George, appreciation doesn’t make artists. It ruins them. A man’s best work is done when he is fighting to make himself heard, not when swooning audiences wait for his paragraphs. An elevated train two doors away can have far more to do with a fine book than advance royalties or ‘an eager printer’s boy waiting in the hall.’ If you don’t want to fight them you shouldn’t be writing. One can’t force attention by making one’s work superb. Only practice can do that. ”
John Steinbeck in a letter to George Albee, Pacific Grove, 1931 (via zeloveinitiative)
Tortilla Flat. John Steinbeck. Cover artist Ruth Gannett. Publisher Covici-Friede, 1935. First edition.
…
“Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.” ― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
“ The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, ‘Oh,the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?’ But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool. ”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden (via ilcielonotturno)
“ It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. ”
John Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez (via charlottexcsullivan)
“ So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world. ”
Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck (via flyingfarther)
“ It is usual that the moment you write for publication … one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness. ”
John Steinbeck, from The Writer’s Chapbook, edited and introduced by George Plimpton (via apoetreflects)
