John Steinbeck
Quotes
I don't anticipate trouble and so I anticipate trouble.
It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
You are a good man, Sire, and a good man draws women as cheese draws mice.
It is a matter of disillusion to young male Americans otherwise informed, to discover that the French are a moral people — judged, that is, by American country-club standards.
It is the misfortune of men to want to do a thing well, even a thing they do not want to do at all.
Doc cried to no one, "Give me a little time! I want to think.[…] Everyone has something. And what has Suzy got? Absolutely nothing in the world but guts. She's taken on an atomic world with a sling-shot, and, by God, she's going to win! If she doesn't win there's no point in living any more.
"What do I mean, win?" Doc asked himself. "I know. If you are not defeated, you win"
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power.
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.
The one thing our species is helpless against is good fortune. It first puzzles, then frightens, then angers, and finally destroys us.
