John Steinbeck

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.

I nearly always write — just as I nearly always breathe.

Courage and fear were one thing too.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

All we got is the family unbroke.

for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

He said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought."

With knowledge there is no hope,... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.

...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.

Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.

This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now - why, you can't find all the cards.

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.