John Steinbeck Quotes

We should just know that we can all create this special, safe place within ourselves that we can feel comfortable in and that doesn't necessarily have to be with other people.

I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume it's what I said.

The teenager's room is her cave. It is here she can meet herself, undistracted by the new hassles life is making for her. Here, she can reflect.

This is a place where you can go, that you can feel safe and look inside yourself and discover yourself.

Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep

What I would most like to think they would take away, is what I take away when I read my favorite books. Which is the knowledge that there is always somewhere you can go, that you love, and where you're safe. And that's how I feel about my favorite books, wherever I am, if I've got that book with me, I've got a place where I can go and be happy. So if that place is Hogwarts for anyone, then I couldn't be more honored or humbled.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Dear friend, I feel great! I really mean it. I have to remember his for the next time I'm having a terrible week. Have you wer done that? You feel really bad, and then it goes away, and you don't know why. I try to remind myself when I feel great like this that there will be another terrible week coming someday, so I should store up as many great details as I can, so during the next terrible week, I can remember those details and believe that I'll feel great again. It doesn't work a lot, but I think it's very important to try.

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

Intuitively we all like to seek the things that are comfortable rather than uncomfortable. But I do think there is a way of saying that if I believe in justice and I believe that justice is a constant struggle, and if I want to create justice, then I have to get comfortable with struggle.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Men seek out retreats for themselves in the country, by the seaside, on the moutains . . . But all this is unphilosophical to the last degree . . . when thou canst at a moment's notice retire into thyself.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those." "Jesus?" "No, Bruce Springsteen.

Seth gave her that: a private space to believe in the illusion of normalcy.

I'm trying to educate people about things that I believe are right, and some of the things that I believe are right might not be right, so I live in constant self-doubt. I think that creates a kind of search that you have to have, and it prevents you from doing a lot of stuff that you would normally do.

I am terribly shy, but of course no one believes me. Come to think of it, neither would I.

I wrote poetry in a secretive way, I think, a secret from myself, I mean. I wrote it because it gave me great pleasure to do so and because it relieved the ever-building pressure of the demanding world around me. It's always served me as a way of appraising, and controlling overwhelming experiences. But this need, and desire, was always in conflict with my need to "survive."

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

I started to realize, a lot of times if you go into your memory, your sense memory, you know more than you think you do, from having watched and listened.