Quote collection
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use."
"Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child."
"Thou mayest rule over sin."
"Lennie begged, "Le's do it now. Le's get that place now." "Sure right now. I gotta. We gotta."
"He said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god."
"Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing."
"In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself."
"He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it."
"Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward."
"You never oughta drink water when it ain't runnin'."
"I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame."
"Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it."
"But a man needs company."
"The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down."
"The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil."
"The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant"
"Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope."
"What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster."
"If you are in love-that's a good thing-that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone."
"A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked."