Cup of Gold

by John Steinbeck

“Why do men like me want sons?” he wondered. “It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance with life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone. Perhaps the boy is doing what I might have done had I been brave enough years past.

Merlin was one who collected about himself a swarm of little legends.

Past and future mingle in an odious, eternal now.”

“You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man—if only you remain a little child. All the world’s great have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes caught a firefly. But if one grow to a man’s mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could—and so, it catches no fireflies.”

That is greater horror to an old man than death—to be forgotten.”

It is a cruel thing to lose a son for whom you have lived continuously.

“Here is one of those divinely endowed creatures who control the fire I lack altogether.”

He had blindly followed the injunctions of the shrewd elder Cato in dealing with his slaves.

People have so often been hurt and trapped and tortured by ideas and contraptions which they did not understand, that they have come to believe all things passing their understanding are vicious and evil—things to be stamped out and destroyed by the first comer.

Those who say children are happy, forget their childhood.

“But do you think it possible, as I have heard, that Morgan himself has three arms and wields a sword in each?”

You get the impression that a great mass is planted before you; and he moves as though he pushed his own invisible cage ahead of him.”

“They are moving,” he thought. “I am not moving. I am fixed. I am the center of all things and cannot move. I am as heavy as the universe. Perhaps I am the universe.”