What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create – this is man.
Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?
There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn’t say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn’t like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn’t shave.
You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.
Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
Casy said solemnly, “This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ just died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now his dead, an’ that don’t matter…
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.
As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
Don’t you love Jesus?’ Well, I thought an’ I thought an’ finally I says, ‘No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.
Like most modern people, I don’t believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.
It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.””And memory.””Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.
The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb.
It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well.
Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
There are times that one treasures for all one’s life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning.
Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.
It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary
All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent
I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’swhy.
Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.
The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.
In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind–but he must get there first.
It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.
And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness.
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.
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
I’ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I’ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.
His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layer of frailty men want to be good and want be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.
It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think youcontrol it.
The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.
Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.
Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now — look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
Suddenly he knew joy and sorrow felted into one fabric. Courage and fear were one thing too.
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is–and a woman too, I guess.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. … When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.
Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.
Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.
Henry liked fun and avoided when he could any solemn or serious matter, for he confused these with sorrow.
When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.
During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude.
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.
It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.
Memory of the knife will be gone when the flesh is gone.
You don’t even know where I’m going.””I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.
There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans
And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey–a look of longing. “Lord! I wish I could go.
Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me.
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
An’ I got to thinkin’, on’y it wasn’t thinkin’, it was deeper down than thinkin’.
… but she was also bewilderingly lonely… Abra had lost her gift for being alone.
I don’t want advice.’ ‘Nobody does. It’s a giver’s present.
Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
A reputation for money is almost as negotiable as money itself.
If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improve
No one doubts your courage, but you are a headstrong knight and when you choose a way you cannot change your course even if it lead to your destruction. That is your fault and your destiny.
…evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.
Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.
Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’ not to no murder. You done right. Don’t you kill nobody if you can help it.
One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
Man has a choice and it’s a choice that makes him a man.
The last clear definite function of men—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man.
And is usually true of a man of one idea, [Charles] became obsessed.
Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad or a stimulant
I do love her, and that’s odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else.
I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry.
Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have.
Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.
Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.
I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of the truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agonyof a lie is neverlost. That’s a running sore
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments
There was no desire in him for a state or condition, no picture in his mind of the thing to be when he had followed his longing; but only a burning and a will overpowering to journey outward and outward after the earliest risen star.
What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.
Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
He had drawn a derogatory statement from George. He felt safe now.
Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus’ spreads out his sin.
Got a lot of sinful idears–but they seem kinda sensible.
She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it.
…and the break would never come as long as fear can turn to wrath.
And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.
But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there.
The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience.
We still go where we want, even if we got to crawl for the right.’ – Tom Joad (Jr.)
A man can do a lot of damage in the church. When someone comes here, he’s got his guard up. But in church a man’s wide open.
And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting–only the deeply personal and familiar.
… you can’t start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relived when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.
It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice!
The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men
We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t a man. The bank isn’t like a man.Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need… Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.-Uncle John
You fellas don’ know what you’re doin. You’re helpin to starve kids…You don’ know what you’re a’ doin’.
And don’t worry about losing. If i is right, it happens – the main thing is not to hurry.Nothing good gets away.
For how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division.
No – the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy – everything, even me.
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
You keep out of my bed,” said Danny, for he knew that Joe Portagee had come to stay. The way he sat in a chair and crossed his knees had an appearance of permanence.
When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.
And he didn’t get tired or sleepy, for the beauty burned in him like fire.
Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.
We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.
Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
Well, we all got to make a livin’.””Yeah,” Tom said. “On’y I wisht they was some way to make her ‘thout takin’ her away from somebody else.
Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.
Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.
He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth. And laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death. And sometimes, it isn’t in time.
Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sunk beneath the ground.
Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it.
That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
Money’s easy to make if it’s money you want. But with few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.
Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.
This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk.””Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee. Maybe that’s what immortality is.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.An all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless.We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
Why are you making no more songs?’ I said to him in a tone like that. ‘Why are you making no more songs?’ ‘I have grown to be a man. Only children make songs — children and idiots.’ [William the road-mender about Merlin]
Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one.
Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
We do know that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on our coffins.
I don’t ever drink alone. It’s not much fun. And I don’t think I will until I am an alcoholic.
There were people who gave everything they had to the war because it was the last war and by winning it we would remove war like a thorn from the flesh of the world and there wouldn’t be any more such horrible nonsense.
Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough
A wife is like a children’s movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete
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.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.
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.
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business.
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
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.
It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.