top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I guess there are never enough books."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that."
"As far as now I can tell that most Stephen King fans don't know him well. They have read or viewed few works and their judge is based on them... that's now well knowing a writer!"
"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."
"Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn't blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen."
"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago."
"I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes-I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back."
"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck
"I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate."
"The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had."
"I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. 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."
"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."
"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 living in Gitano's head."
"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."
bottom of page