He said, “I wish I could see the inside of your mind. It seems to flutter around, but it’s a cool, collected mind. It’s so—sure of itself.”
Mary went to sit on his lap for a moment. “Not so awfully sure. You don’t know, and I’m glad you dont.”
—John Steinbeck, The Long Valley
“ Are the eaters more immoral than the eaten? In the end all are eaten—all—gobbled up by the earth, even the fiercest and the most crafty. ”
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (via thetidepool)
“ The eighth child was named Hazel before the mother got it through her head that Hazel was a boy and by that time she was used to the name and never bothered to change it. Hazel grew up—did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn’t learn anything in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn’t pay enough attention. He came out of reform school as innocent of viciousness as he was of fractions and long division. ”
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (via saltforsalt)
“ …There was no anger in her for Kino. He had said, “I am a man,” and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. ”
The Pearl by John Steinbeck, (via retro-tetro)
Commonly misquoted:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
“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, won’t 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 didn’t 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—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
(source: Wikiquote)
“ I guess we’re all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. ”
Ethan Allen Hawley in the Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (via alberttine)
“ We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change. ”
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (via heartquake-ing)
“ It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that the soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than a backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin? ”
John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (via nauticalmiles)
“ A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyways. 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. ”
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck (via princesspineapplella)
“ ‘Look, kid,” she said. ‘You’ll just have to believe this until you find it out for yourself—everybody’s a tramp some time or other. Everybody. And the worst tramps of all are the ones that call it something else.’ ”
John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus (via iwillnotsuckyou)
“ Everyone is related to the world through something. I through words… before I stopped writing, words had become treacherous and untrustworthy to me. And then, without announcement they began assembling quietly and they slipped down my pencil to the paper - not the tricky, clever, lying, infected words - but simpler, stately, beautiful, old with dignity and fresh and young as that bird wakes me with a song as old as the world and announces every day as a new thing in creation. My love and respect and homage for my language is coming back. Here are proud words and sharp words and words as dainty as little girls and stone words needing no adjectives as crutches. And they join hands and dance beauty on the paper. ”
John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters (via annabelsmith)
