Quote collection
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous."
"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.... The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?"
"We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it."
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."
"A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences."
"Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature."
"Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully."
"What good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world - temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics."
"I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied."
"I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China."
"Then it is better, sir, to love whom one cannot have?" "Probably better," Lancelot said. "Certainly safer."
"A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody."
"Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also."
"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."
"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
"Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them."
"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
"A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory"
"These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies."
"Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word."