John Steinbeck Quotes

Kisten, please don't leave me," I begged, and his eyes opened. "I'm cold," he said, fear rising in his blue eyes. I held him tighter. "I'm holding you. It's going to be okay." "Tell Ivy," he said with a gasp, clenching in on himself. "Tell Ivy that it wasn't her fault. And tell her that at the end... you remember love. I don't think... we lose our souls... at all. I think God keeps them for us until we... come home. I love you, Rachel." "I love you, too, Kisten," I sobbed, and as I watched, his eyes, memorizing my face, silvered, and he died.

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

Lady," she whimpered softly, wondering if she would meet her wolf again when she was dead.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

A lot of people want to die for a lot of reasons.

I'm terrified I'm about to die, or that all the people I love are about to die, every second of every day.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

Death belongs to the dying and those who love them.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.

If I didn't like someone, I wouldn't want him calling me up when I was dying. I wouldn't want them having regrets that they didn't talk to me.

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

Next door, there's an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

The paradox is, I can't miss the good things about my father while he is alive, but I will of course miss him... when he is dead.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

Old age is a shipwreck.