Steinbeck Wisdom

snippets of John Steinbeck prose

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“You see, there’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be. What are you like?”

- East of Eden

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”

- East of Eden

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull times that have no duration whatsoever.”

- East of Eden

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it”

~East of Eden

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments, and nowhere is my natural anarchism more aroused than at national borders”

~ Travels with Charley

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them.”

~ The Log from the Sea of Cortez

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”

~ Travels with Charley

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“Man is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power… having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them.”

~ The Log from the Sea of Cortez

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”

~ Travels with Charley

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans”

~ The Log from the Sea of Cortez

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”

~Of Mice and Men

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

“I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.”

~ Travels with Charley

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desires are for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land.

~ Travels with Charley

[Steinbeck Wisdom @Steinbeck_Prose]

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement.