1,374 Quotes by John Steinbeck

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.

Ad astra per alia porci

And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.

I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.

He had drawn a derogatory statement from George. He felt safe now.

Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.

I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.