1
Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.John Steinbeck
2
Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?John Steinbeck
3
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 there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.John Steinbeck
4
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. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out. .John Steinbeck
5
War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.John Steinbeck
6
In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind--but he must get there first.John Steinbeck
7
Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.John Steinbeck
8
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.John Steinbeck
9
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.John Steinbeck
10
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.John Steinbeck
11
A reputation for money is almost as negotiable as money itself.John Steinbeck
12
The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.John Steinbeck
13
I do love her, and that’s odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else.John Steinbeck
14
Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?John Steinbeck
15
Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously–a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it.John Steinbeck
16
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.John Steinbeck
17
Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?John Steinbeck