Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.
Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.
Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.
The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy
Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.
If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.
But you can't start over Only a boy can start over You and me Why, we're all that's been
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.
You stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.
I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.
It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.
Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.
People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row
You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.
What do I want in a doctor? Perhaps more than anything else-a friend with special knowledge.
For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.
Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.
Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.
If you are in love-that's a good thing-that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone.
There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.
Lennie begged, "Le's do it now. Le's get that place now." "Sure right now. I gotta. We gotta.