Category: Author John Steinbeck

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s 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 it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it. John Steinbeck The Grapes…

In Cal the process had been so long and so slow that he felt no strangeness. He had built a wall of self-sufficiency around himself, strong enough to defend him against the world. If his wall had any weak places they may have been on the sides nearest Aron and Lee, and particularly nearest Adam.…

Feed a man, cloth him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair. John Steinbeck East of Eden 1 An’ I got to thinkin’, on’y it wasn’t thinkin’, it was deeper down than thinkin’. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath 1 Morning seems to come earlier every year I live. John…

They was this rich fella, an he makes like he’s poor, an they’s this rich girl, an she purtends like she’s poor too, an’ they meet in a hamburg’ stan’Why?I don’t know why-that’s how it was.Why’d they purtend like they’s poor?Well, they’re tired of bein’ rich.Horseshit!You want to hear this, or not?Well, go on then.…

That’s why I’m 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. John Steinbeck East of Eden 13 The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single…

Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. John Steinbeck East of Eden 1 …and the break…

But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him… or he’ll never be a man. All his life he’ll feel guilty and alone unless you release him. John Steinbeck East of Eden 90 Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that…

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than…

And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in between anywhere. John Steinbeck The Pearl 12 Some day, his mind said, that boy would know what things were in the books and what…

There’s a capacity for appetite,’ Samuel said, ‘that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy. John Steinbeck East of Eden 2 Was she very beautiful, Samuel?””To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation. John Steinbeck East of Eden 2 It was Una, he…