John Steinbeck Quotes

We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

I just don't see the light. Where is the light? What am I in this for?

We are not surprised to learn that panic and confusion are hourly gaining ground in Britain.

I tell you naught for your comfort Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

None of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong.

So what if right now everything is wrong?

What the hell am I doing here?

Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and mess all around. But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know they all were?

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

He had the same empty confusion in his eyes that I saw in my mirror every morning, that odd sort of denial that only seems to come when the world decides to jump the rails without warning you first.

The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.

It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction