John Steinbeck Quotes - Page 49 | Just Great DataBase

The bunk was a long, rectangular building. Inside, the walls were whitewashed and the floor unpainted. In three walls there were small, square windows, and in the fourth a solid door with a wooden latch. Against the walls were eight bunks, five of them made up with blankets and the other three showing their burlap ticking. Over each bunk there was nailed an apple-box with the opening forward so that it made two shelves for the personal belongings of the occupant of the bunk. And these shelves were loaded with little articles, soap and talcum-powder, razors and those Western magazines ranch-men love to read and scoff at and secretly believe. And there were medicines on the shelves, and little vials, combs; and, from nails on the box-sides, a few neck-ties. Near one wall there was a black cast-iron stove, its stove-pipe going straight up through the ceiling. In the middle of the room stood a big square table littered with playing-cards, and around it were grouped boxes for the players to sit on.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.

„Не е нужно човек да е много умен, за да е добър. Дори ми се струва, че е точно обратното.

Lee carried a tin lantern to light the way, for it was one of those clear early winter nights when the sky riots with stars and the earth seems doubly dark because of them.

Suddenly he knew joy and sorrow felted into one fabric. Courage and fear were one thing too. He found that he had started to hum a droning little tune. He turned, walked through the kitchen, and stood in the doorway, looking at Cathy. She smiled weakly at him, and he thought, What a child! What a helpless child! and a surge of love filled him.

It was a bad day when three or four men were not standing around the forge, listening to Samuel’s hammer and his talk. They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

Cînd eşti copil, eşti în centrul tuturor lucrurilor. Totul se întîmplă pentru tine. Ceilalţi oameni? Sînt doar nişte fantome puse la dispoziţia ta ca să le vorbeşti. Dar cînd creşti, îţi iei locul şi îţi capeţi măsura şi forma ta proprie. Anumite lucruri pornesc de la tine spre ceilalţi şi îţi vin ţie din partea altora. E mai rău, dar e şi mult mai bine aşa

You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.

And just as there was a cleanness about his body, so there was a cleanness in his thinking. Men coming to his blacksmith shop to talk and listen dropped their cursing for a while, not from any kind of restraint but automatically, as though this were not the place for it.

I don’t think I’ve ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that’s negative.

Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny. Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, Yes, ma’am, and his voice was toneless. For

And now that your don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

I’ll rustle up some dinner.

Samuel smiled at him. They say man lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.

There’s a capacity for appetite, Samuel said, that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.

And in the summer the river didn’t run at all above ground.

He had good children and he raised them fine. All doing well -maybe except Joe...they're talking about sending him to college, but all the rest are fine.

Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!And some men eased themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.