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When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
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
Nothing
Mean
Something
Usually
Men
Says
Think
Means
Thinking
Speak
Else
Doe
More quotes by John Steinbeck
Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.
John Steinbeck
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
It don't cost money to ask.
John Steinbeck
A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
John Steinbeck
If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.
John Steinbeck
Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.
John Steinbeck
It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.
John Steinbeck
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
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
John Steinbeck
But a man needs company.
John Steinbeck
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
John Steinbeck
I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
John Steinbeck
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.
John Steinbeck
The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
John Steinbeck
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.
John Steinbeck
My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
John Steinbeck
All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.
John Steinbeck
Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.
John Steinbeck
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
John Steinbeck
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
John Steinbeck