Minds me of a story they tell about Willy Feeley when he was a young fella. Willy was bashful, awful bashful. Well, one day he takes a heifer over to Graves’ bull. Ever’body was out...

Cathy’s lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or...

It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus’ spreads out his sin.

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is...

Doc turned in the seat and looked back. The disappearing sun shone on his laughing face, his gay and eager face. With his left hand he held the bucking steering wheel.Cannery Row looked after the...

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create – this is man.

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.

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.

Kur pinigai, ten įprastos elgesio normos gali ilsėtis.

All great and precious things are lonely.

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...

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.

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in...

Anything that just costs money is cheap.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming...

Courage and fear were one thing too.

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...

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.

Na jaren van zwoegen merken we dat we geen reis maken, maar dat de reis on maakt. Reisleiders, dienstregelingen, reserveringen, star en onvermijdelijk, doen hun uiterste best om de persoonlijkheid van de reis te slopen.

Life is knowledge, livin it is Succes!

Eventlessness has no post to drape duration on.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing...

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....

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...

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.

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

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...

Old Tom giggled, “Fooled ya, huh, Ma? We aimed to fool ya, and we done it. Jus’ stood there like a hammered sheep. Wisht Grampa’d been here to see. Looked like somebody’d beat ya between...

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....

She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it.

Smile and thank God, that you are alive today!

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.

I don’t ever drink alone. It’s not much fun. And I don’t think I will until I am an alcoholic.

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

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and...

this nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

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,...

Porque se dice que los humanos no se satisfacen jamás, que se les da una cosa y siempre quieren algo más. Y se dice esto con erróneo desprecio, ya que es una de las mayores...

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There...

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.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for...

You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.

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

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one.

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

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...