"Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans"
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
John Steinbeck quotes (page 13 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor."
Read quote
7 likes
"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
Read quote
7 likes
"A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"
Read quote
7 likes
"Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future."
Read quote
7 likes
"Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?"
Read quote
7 likes
"Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man."
Read quote
7 likes
"People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all."
Read quote
7 likes
"A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights."
Read quote
7 likes
"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
Read quote
7 likes
"Perhaps it takes courage to raise children."
Read quote
7 likes
"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."
Read quote
7 likes
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Read quote
7 likes
"Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession."
Read quote
7 likes
"I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one."
Read quote
7 likes
"We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have."
Read quote
7 likes
"The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence."
Read quote
7 likes
"One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter, "Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.""
Read quote
7 likes
"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome."
Read quote
7 likes
"Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different."
Read quote
7 likes