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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Tails
Impulse
Mess
Guess
Woman
Good
Men
Impulses
Tail

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A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
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The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
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I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were.
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Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.
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So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.
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You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
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Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
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for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
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I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.
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Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?
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You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.
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An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.
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A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.
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You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
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The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
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Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.
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I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
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