Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey—a look of longing. “Lord! I wish I could go.” “Don’t you like it here?” “Sure. It’s all right, but I wish I could go.” “You don’t even know where I’m going.” “I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.”

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.

I began to formulate a new law describing the relationship of protection to despondency. A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

I’ve always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that 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. In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency?

the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true—a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words?

For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization.

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

Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?

Sometimes the view of change is distorted by a change in oneself.

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

When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.

Recently a dear Southern friend instructed me passionately in the theory of “equal but separate.” “It just happens,” he said, “that in my town there are three new Negro schools not equal but superior to the white schools. Now wouldn’t you think they would be satisfied with that? And in the bus station the washrooms are exactly the same. What’s your answer to that?” I said, “Maybe it’s a matter of ignorance. You could solve it and really put them in their places if you switched schools and toilets. The moment they realized that your schools weren’t as good as theirs, they would realize their error.” And do you know what he said? He said, “You troublemaking son of a bitch.” But he said it smiling.

I guess when they’re drafting peacemakers they’d better pass me by.