John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flatand Cannery Row, the multi-generation epic East of Eden, and the novellas Of Mice and Menand The Red Pony. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth27 February 1902
CountryUnited States of America
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 eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
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.
Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.
At one point, as Samuel urges Adam to raise his boys well regardless of the blood that might be in them, Adam tells him, "You can't make a race horse of a pig." Samuel replies, "No, but you can make a very fast pig.
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.
The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.
But 'Thou mayest!'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win
I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.
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.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.
Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?
He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.