John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
11 quotes
"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 baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?"
"War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men."
"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."
"Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms."
"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."
"A reputation for money is almost as negotiable as money itself."
"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."
"I do love her, and that’s odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else."
"Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess."
"Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it."
"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders."