Risa Davis > Risa's Quotes

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
― John Steinbeck, شرق بهشت

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
― John Steinbeck

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”
― John Steinbeck

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“No one who is young is ever going to be old.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
― John Steinbeck

“Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row