John Steinbeck Quotes

Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans

I feel like a lot of comedians do have that deep, dark thing. I have my stuff, but I don't go to that dark place.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

In El-harím, there lived a man, a man with yellow eyes. To me, he said, "Beware the whispers, for they whisper lies. Do not wrestle with the demons of the dark, Else upon your mind they'll place a mark; Do not listen to the shadows of the deep, Else they haunt you even when you sleep.

It's not just lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you're running from-it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean.

Everyone fears and courts his own demon.

So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.---Richard Pryor

My sleep wasn't peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

We all invite our own devils, and we must exorcise our own.