Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

“You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”

see over and over in every part of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here.

I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.

Then gradually I write one page and then another.

And I felt at last that my journey was started. I think I hadn’t really believed in it before.

She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. “It is a glory,” she said, “and can’t be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise.”

George would have found his, or rather her, end in a bonfire, because if ever there was a familiar, an envoy of the devil, a consorter with evil spirits, George is it.

helped to spawn a school of secret dangers. Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors,

pen is INSANE

Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday.

And after dark he came into Rocinante and admired her facilities and we drank some whisky together and had a nice visit and told each other a few lies.

After he drove away in his jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me.

!!!

I saw it for the first and only time in early October, the air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-gay tree was set off, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I’ve seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece.

This is one of the few places I have ever seen where the night was friendlier than the day.

Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

Bears don’t argue.”

I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.

If he were a horse I wouldn’t buy him.

If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there, but it wouldn’t go that far. They would be instantly picked up as suspicious characters and deported over the city line.

because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

Like how dare he pen this

And I did not fire.

Their lives were mine. I put the safety on and laid the rifle on the table.

Now I had a token responsibility for two live and healthy coyotes. In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time. I opened two cans of dog food and left them as a votive.

Even our own misguided species might re-emerge from the desert. The lone man and his sun-toughened wife who cling to the shade in an unfruitful and uncoveted place might, with their brothers in arms—the coyote, the jackrabbit, the horned toad, the rattlesnake, together with a host of armored insects— these trained and tested fragments of life might well be the last hope of life against non-life. The desert has mothered magic things before this.

“Oh, no sir!” he said. “I’ve been practicing to be a Negro a long time.”