"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
— John Steinbeck

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people."
— John Steinbeck

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"I guess there are never enough books."
— John Steinbeck

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"Anything that just costs money is cheap."
— John Steinbeck

"It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)

"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
— John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff"
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"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."
— John Steinbeck

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do."
— John Steinbeck (The Pastures of Heaven)

"An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment."
— John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men)

"All great and precious things are lonely."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man without words is a man without thought."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself."
— John Steinbeck

"It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it."
— John Steinbeck

"It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.'"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"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. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962"
— John Steinbeck

"The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."
— John Steinbeck

"'Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.'"
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"No one who is young is ever going to be old."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Don't make everyone knows about your sadness."
— John Steinbeck

"I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"He never fell,
never slipped back,
never flew."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)