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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 19ac410 | I seen fellas like you before. You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song. 'What we comin' to?' You don' wanta know. Country's movin' aroun', goin' places. They's folks dyin' all aroun'. Maybe you'll die pretty soon, but you won't know nothin'. I seen too many fellas like you. You don't want to know nothin'. Just sing yourself to sleep with a song--'What we comin' to? | the-grapes-of-wrath | John Steinbeck | |
| 1271f18 | I guess a man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 4d84e69 | A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about?" I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 02d931b | What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways? We don't want no pants rabbits. | John Steinbeck | ||
| f31e2d8 | I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention,help,and conversation is to be lost.A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost | John Steinbeck | ||
| 96bdb6f | Nobody knows. What good's an opinion if you don't know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty's beard. I don't even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that makes a rock or table. I don't even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We've got nothing to go on -- got no way to think about things. | specialization | John Steinbeck | |
| 3b16920 | And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. | John Steinbeck | ||
| baa4fbe | And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey--a look of longing. "Lord! I wish I could go." "Don't you like it here?" "Sure. It's all right, but I wish I could go." "You don't even know where I'm going." "I don't care. I'd like to go anywhere." | John Steinbeck | ||
| c65f5ff | I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im. | depression education society writing | John Steinbeck | |
| 40771ad | My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. | John Steinbeck | ||
| a4868c6 | I eat stories like grapes. | samuel stories | John Steinbeck | |
| 63007a9 | Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you'd shake a rug. | fiction john-steinbeck | John Steinbeck | |
| 11bf857 | Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 41bdc7f | We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't a man. The bank isn't like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. | capitalism greed the-grapes-of-wrath | John Steinbeck | |
| 6ea5f7c | Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. | healing john-steinbeck sickness | John Steinbeck | |
| 454f6a8 | It don't take no nerve to do somepin when there ain't nothin' else you can do. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 7f086e3 | For how can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness? | John Steinbeck | ||
| 527dc40 | They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out. This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 393d97c | Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 2dbd052 | When I was a kid my ol' man give me a haltered heifer an' says take her down an git her serviced. An' the fella says, I done it, an' ever' time since then when I hear a business man talkin' about service, I wonder who's gettin' screwed. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 59954c0 | Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. | time | John Steinbeck | |
| 54a62f6 | Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll .. | John Steinbeck | ||
| b7176c2 | There were frogs all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the night, they boomed and barked and croaked and rattled. They sang to the stars, to the waning moon, to the waving grasses. They bellowed long songs and challenges. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 9ce777f | Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton) | time-passing | John Steinbeck | |
| 3c7deae | A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 08de05a | The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts will do the same thing in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in a path or a breath caught at the sight of a pretty girl or a finger nail nicked in the garden soil. | direction history | John Steinbeck | |
| d0ee49c | I've tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn't enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn't true anymore. Aron didn't grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn't stand to have it come out any other way. I don't want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it's going on. We wer.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 363d818 | What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless. | life mourning regrets | John Steinbeck | |
| f5d0cd8 | There seemed to be no cure for loneliness save only being alone. | John Steinbeck | ||
| c898b4b | I think I can," Lee answered Samuel. "I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody's story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I'm feeling my way now--don't jump on me if I'm not clear. 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 wit.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 0974e47 | To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success--they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is the.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| ce2a8de | Morning seems to come earlier every year I live. | life time | John Steinbeck | |
| 0286cda | But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| f434cea | although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world. [p. 13] | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| 1ea447c | Obsessed is more like it. But yeah, I saw you happy. Happier than you've been in a really, really long time. With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high. Does that make sense?" "It does. It also makes me sound bipolar." "Love will do that to a person." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| a7be5b0 | You'd be surprised how far away half dead is from fully dead, | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 67870a9 | I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want. But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs .. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| 79e5c13 | There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| e63f25f | I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels. | names naming nomenclature | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| 9d35d4a | When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear. | fear quote voice words | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| b75c9b5 | William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand. | conquering first-step | Salman Rushdie | |
| 4f2ddd7 | I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| ba32085 | The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue. | virtue | Salman Rushdie | |
| 76ca1b3 | After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. | Salman Rushdie |