Once There Was a War Quotes

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“There are several ways to wear a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of a hat, but not with a helmet. It won't go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“Once when I felt a little bruised by censorship I sent through Herodotus’s account of the battle of Salamis fought between the Greeks and Persians in 480 B.C., and since there were place names involved, albeit classical ones, the Navy censors killed the whole story.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA,”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“There are times in war when the sharpest emotion is not fear, but loneliness and littleness.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War