John Steinbeck Quotes

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.

I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

Remember this? You gave it to me for ensuring your trigger finger got reattached to your hand. You said it would remind me of that spark of decency inside me. I'm trying to do something decent now, Captain.

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

I know that all the magic kisses in the world probably couldn't have helped him today. But I would do anything to have been able to give him one.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

I do what I can to sort of just stave off the clock - walk, swim, try and smoke an electric cigarette. I mean it's all bad for you. Life is bad. We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.

Every acknowledgment of gratitude is a circumstance of humiliation; and some are found to submit to frequent mortifications of this kind, proclaiming what obligations they owe, merely because they think it in some measure cancels the debt.

If all I can say is I'm not in this swamp, I'm not in this swamp then there is not a rope in front of me and there is not an alligator behind me and there is not a girl sitting at the edge eating a hot dog and if I believe that, then dying would be the only answer because then Death couldn't come and say Peachy to me anymore and after all she has a brother who believes in hope.

The turtle couldn't help us.

I'm not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I'm just a corpse who wants not to be.

Some people are beyond help, just accept that.

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

No man is boss in his own home, but he can make up for it, he thinks, by making a dog play dead.

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.

You feel the intense desire to do good, to do right thing. At this stage, you also feel helpless.

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

What an absurd amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to find out how things 'really are', when all the time they weren't.

Nothing makes sense, why should I?

try to enjoy myself when I can - I'll be miserable enough as it is.

I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself.

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.