I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.
I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments.
It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.
Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
We don't take a trip. A trip takes us.
A dog...is a bond between strangers.
But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed -- because 'Thou mayest.
With knowledge there is no hope... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.
To find where you are going, you must know where you are.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
Longer Version:
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long.
Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
Longer Version:
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Longer Version:
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
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.
There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.
Aron's training in worldliness was gained from a young man of no experience, which gave him the ability for generalization only the inexperienced can have.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
Longer Version:
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.
Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough.
In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.
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.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.
There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
All of them had a restlessness in common.
Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.
Longer Version:
Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.... In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals.... What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?
I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble.
No -- the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy -- everything, even me.
The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.
It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.
Doc still loved true things but he knew that it was not a general love and it could be a very dangerous mistress.
If you want to keep a friend, never test him.
When a man comes to die,
no matter what his talents and influences and genius,
if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him
and his dying a cold horror.
For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.
A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.
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.
He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
Longer Version:
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
She sighed as she always does, a deep, gathered breath and a low release of luxury. Some people resent awakening, but not Mary. She comes to a day with the expectancy that it will be good.
Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.
I always found in myself a dread of the west and a love of the east.
Quotes by John Steinbeck are featured in:
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