# Quote — John Steinbeck, East of Eden

> Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished…

- Author: [John Steinbeck](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck.md)
- Book: [East of Eden](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck/east-of-eden.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#East_of_Eden_(1952)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck/east-of-eden/sometimes-a-kind

## More from this book

> You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns.

p. 216 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck/east-of-eden/you-might-get.md)

> I have wondered why it is that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death than others.

p. 290 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck/east-of-eden/i-have-wondered.md)

> He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing.

p. 283 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-steinbeck/east-of-eden/he-told-me-how.md)