Quote

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.

John Steinbeck

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Small
Hot
Pitcher
Erupted
Littles
Smell
Cheerful
Liza
Rose
Formed
Batter
Little
Turned
Cake
Cakes
Good
Sweet
Thick
Tracing
Like
Ready
Onto
Volcanoes
Food
Kitchen
Poured
Full
Brown
Darker

More quotes by John Steinbeck

Image
If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
John Steinbeck
Image
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
John Steinbeck
Image
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.
John Steinbeck
Image
They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)
John Steinbeck
Image
A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.
John Steinbeck
Image
As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
John Steinbeck
Image
You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
John Steinbeck
Image
Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
John Steinbeck
Image
A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.
John Steinbeck
Image
Don't make everyone know about your sadness.
John Steinbeck
Image
For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.
John Steinbeck
Image
It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary
John Steinbeck
Image
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
John Steinbeck
Image
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.
John Steinbeck
Image
For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.
John Steinbeck
Image
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.
John Steinbeck
Image
I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.
John Steinbeck
Image
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
John Steinbeck
Image
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
Image
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
John Steinbeck