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 improvement.”[Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]

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

…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.

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

Casy said, “Ol’ Tom’s house can’t be more’n a mile from here. Ain’t she over that third rise?”Sure,” said Joad. “Less somebody stole it, like Pa stole it.”Your pa stole it?”Sure, got it a mile an’ a half east of here an’ drug it. Was a family livin’ there, an’ they moved away. Grampa an’...

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is–and a woman too, I guess.

This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

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.

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.

You don’t even know where I’m going.””I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.

Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.

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, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In...

It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put there faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potential moral units- because...

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind–the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.

Her total intellectual association was the Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she...

But it isn’t hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don’t quite know how.

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things...

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.

He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.

Money’s easy to make if it’s money you want. But with a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury, and they want love, and they want admiration.

Kur pinigai, ten įprastos elgesio normos gali ilsėtis.

He had drawn a derogatory statement from George. He felt safe now.

…..and it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes, those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by an ogreish professional hostess. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as...

Once Ed said to me, “For a very long time I didn’t like myself.” It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. “It was a very difficult time,” he said, “and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them...

It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation; he had no resistance to it at all.

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.

I ain’t never done nothin’ that wasn’t part sin.

Crooks stood up from his bunk and faced her. “I had enough,” he said coldly. “You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room. You got no rights messing around in here at all. Now you jus’ get out, an’ get out quick. If you don’t, I’m gonna ast the boss not to ever...

I know,’ said Winter, ‘but they don’t know.’ And he went on with a thought he had been having. ‘A time-minded people,’ he said, ‘and the time is nearly up. They think that just because they have only one leader and one head, we are all like that. They know that ten heads lopped off...

Well, what you ding this kind of work for–against your own people?””Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner–and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day and it comes every day.””But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty...

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. –John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

The women watched the men, watched to see whether the break had come at last. The women stood silently and watched. And where a number of men gathered together, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place. And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right – the...

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.

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.

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 don’t worry about losing. If i is right, it happens – the main thing is not to hurry.Nothing good gets away.

it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.

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.

At last he said, “Did you come out of the big mountains?”Gitano shook his head slowly. “No, I walked down the Salinas Valley.”The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. “Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?”The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were...

You fellas don’ know what you’re doin. You’re helpin to starve kids…You don’ know what you’re a’ doin’.

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in.silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.

I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention,help,and conversation is to be lost.A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims...

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.

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.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become...

Benar. Kita tak pernah lagi menjumpai kebahagiaan yang setara dengan kebahagiaan masa kanak-kanak kita.” Pablo mengangguk sedih.

There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.