Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
In 50 years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?
[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'sai...
You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.
You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around...
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk. But watch it, mister. There's a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses - so beautiful - a packet o...
You see, there's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.
You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.
Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful. Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings,...
When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.
When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
When I was a kid my ol' man give me a haltered heifer an' says take her down an git her serviced. An' the fella says, I done it, an' ever' time since then when I hear a business man talkin' about serv...
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who...
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
Through my own efforts, I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone.