Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

It might be better to let visitors find out for themselves. But maybe we wouldn’t if it weren’t drawn to our attention.

Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,

there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments,

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

The food is oven-fresh, spotless and tasteless; untouched by human hands. I remembered with an ache certain dishes in France and Italy touched by innumerable human hands.

I learned only enough about these men to be sure I would like to know much more.

there is left, particularly on very long trips, a large area for daydreaming or even, God help us, for thought.

I can only suspect that the lonely man peoples his driving dreams with friends, that the loveless man surrounds himself with lovely loving women, and that children climb through the dreaming of the childless driver.

The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us.

There seemed to be no cure for loneliness save only being alone.

Charley was no help. He wasn’t involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.

I remember retorting, “Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before last.”

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

little houses, each one like the next, particularly since they try to be different, spread for a mile in all directions.

Like most Americans I am no lover of cops, and the consistent investigation of city forces for bribery, brutality, and a long and picturesque list of malfeasances is not designed to reassure me.