Sea of Cortez Quotes

“Where there is little danger, there seems to be little stimulation. Perhaps the pattern of struggle is so deeply imprinted in the genes of all life conceived in this benevolently hostile planet that the removal of obstacles automatically atrophies a survival drive.”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

“They were like the men and women who stand about airports and railroad stations; they want to go away, and most of all they want to go away from themselves. For they do not know that they would carry their globes of boredom with them wherever they went.”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

“The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little "why.”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

“And the happy discovery of Stella Polaris—which, although it too shifts very minutely in an arc, is constant relatively—was encouraging. Stella Polaris will get you there. And so to the crawling minds Stella Polaris must have been like a very goddess of constancy, a star to love and trust.”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

“It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist.”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

“examine from this position a rumpled rug or a crooked picture, saying to himself between sips of beer (preferably Carta Blanca beer), “This rug irritates me for some reason. If it were straight, I should be comfortable; but there is only one straight position (and this is of course, only my own personal discipline of straightness) among all possible positions. I am, in effect, trying to impose my will, my insular sense of rightness, on a rug, which of itself can have no such sense, since it seems equally contented straight or crooked. Suppose I should try to straighten people,” and here he sips deeply. “Helen C., for instance, is not neat, and Helen C.”—here he goes into a reverie—“how beautiful she is with her hair messy, how lovely when she is excited and breathing through her mouth.” Again he”
― John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research