East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

“One day we’ll sit and you’ll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now—why, you can’t find all the cards.”

Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.”

Adam looked up for a moment and then back at the boys on the ground. “There’s a crashing in my head,” he said. “Like sounds you hear under water. I’m having to dig myself out of a year.”

“Is it herself trying to come out? When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach.

That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.”

“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

“Millions,” said Lee. “We have more ghosts than anything else. I guess nothing in China ever dies. It’s very crowded. Anyway, that’s the feeling I got when I was there.”

I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?

It’s like a life—so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do. No,”

and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.

‘And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have!”

“Hush, man. Ask her. And you’ll come out of it older but not less confused.”

The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears.

You’ve disturbed my pretty universe. You’ve taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone—let me think!

Una and her father had a conspiracy about learning—secret books were borrowed and read and their secrets communicated privately.

Already he had forgotten the sailing box. All he could think of was a small apron and a sunbonnet and soft little fingers.