East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things

have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.

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.

there is some violence in everyone.

he saw his father as the policeman laid on by birth, the officer who might be circumvented, or fooled, but never challenged.

Tom bruised himself on the world and licked his cuts.

The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.”

a lie is a device for profit or escape.

Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch! And some men eased themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.