Cannery Row (Cannery Row, #1)

by John Steinbeck

Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.

It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab.

Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits. He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.

The starfish were twisted and knotted up, for a starfish loves to hang onto something and for an hour these had found only each other.

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars.

For Monterey was not a town to let dishonor come to a literary man.

Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you’d shake a rug.

Little water snakes slipped down to the rocks and then gently entered the water and swam along through the pool, their heads held up like little periscopes and a tiny wake spreading behind them.

Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads.

It is the hour of the pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

never in frog history had such an execution taken place.

If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known—they might call the police. A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway.

“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”