“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
Work
Steinbeck's last great novel focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family's past fortune, and his father's loss of the family wealth, the hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterises successin every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of combat, operating under 'the laws of controlled savagery.'
Quotes
Showing 1-6 of 6
John Steinbeck
Canonical work source
“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
“Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a...”
“Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, th...”
“Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.”
“I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right o...”