"My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day."
Read quote
30 likes
Quote collection
John Steinbeck quotes (page 4 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other."
Read quote
30 likes
"Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fences, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our own hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."
Read quote
29 likes
"Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back."
Read quote
29 likes
"You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself."
Read quote
28 likes
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
Read quote
28 likes
"Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."
Read quote
27 likes
"Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious."
Read quote
26 likes
"Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."
Read quote
26 likes
"As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment."
Read quote
26 likes
"The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die."
Read quote
26 likes
"If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known."
Read quote
25 likes
"Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk."
Read quote
25 likes
"He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow."
Read quote
24 likes
"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones."
Read quote
23 likes
"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"
Read quote
23 likes
"Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory."
Read quote
23 likes
"Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners."
Read quote
23 likes
"It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."
Read quote
23 likes
"Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God."
Read quote
22 likes