John Steinbeck

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business. They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.

At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

I should have known I am the rain. I am the land and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.

[Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know—that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.

There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

I'll want to hear,' Samuel said. 'I eat stories like grapes.

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.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.