The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs.

Wtf

“The hell you ain’t,” said Joad. “That big old nose of yours been stickin’ out eight miles ahead of your face. You had that big nose goin’ over me like a sheep in a vegetable patch.”

The sperit ain’t in the people much no more; and worse’n that, the sperit ain’t in me no more.

“Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go—off somewheres.

I was a damned ol’ hypocrite. But I didn’t mean to be.”

‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.’

Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’

Hell yeah

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.

A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that. Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But—you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat: It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.

We can’t depend on it. The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

On skibidi

No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

They knew that a man so hurt and so perplexed may turn in anger, even on people he loves.

He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals.

“Times are changed, don’t you know? Thinking about stuff like that don’t feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you’ll never get three dollars a day. Big shots won’t give you three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day.”

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car. They ain’t alive no more. Them sons-a-bitches killed ’em.”

They got to live before they can afford to die.”

“Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth.

Ever’ time Pa seen writin’, somebody took somepin away from ’im.”

“I was mean like a wolf. Now I’m mean like a weasel. When you’re huntin’ somepin you’re a hunter, an’ you’re strong. Can’t nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted—that’s different. Somepin happens to you. You ain’t strong; maybe you’re fierce, but you ain’t strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain’t a hunter no more.

There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more.

every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they’ll all walk together, and there’ll be a dead terror from it.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

I’m scared of stuff so nice. I ain’t got faith. I’m scared somepin ain’t so nice about it.”

the responsibility, and the dignity of her developing breasts,

Wtf

And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them.

Sometimes it seems pretty lonely, an’ sometimes it seems all right, an’ sometimes it seems good. It don’t make no difference.

The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands

only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.

when I hear a business man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s gettin’ screwed.

Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one.

That’s why folks always move. Movin’ ’cause they want somepin better’n what they got. An’ that’s the on’y way they’ll ever git it.

“Here’s me that used to give all my fight against the devil ’cause I figgered the devil was the enemy. But they’s somepin worse’n the devil got hold a the country, an’ it ain’t gonna let go till it’s chopped loose.

“Maybe it ain’t nice for purty, but it’s nice for nice,”

I don’ know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters.

An’ Grampa didn’ die tonight. He died the minute you took ’im off the place.”

“Well, she jus’ won’t run. Starts an’ farts an’ stops.

Lol

There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.

For the quality of owning

freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

don’ keep ya guard up when nobody ain’t sparrin’ with ya.

“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—not rich like Mis’ Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa died. I ain’t tryin’ to preach no sermon, but I never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie dog collectin’ stuff that wasn’t disappointed.”

Take your breath in when you need it, an’ let it go when you need to.”

“You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.”

“I’m jus’ pain covered with skin.

“It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do.

On’y one thing in this worl’ I’m sure of, an’ that’s I’m sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella’s life.