Quotes from The Winter of Our Discontent

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“To be alive at all is to have scars. ”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent. ”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“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.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“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.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“If you want to keep a friend, never test him.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

“A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent

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“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Mother Night

“. . . And so Charlie Asher . . . led an army of fourteen-inch-tall bundles of animal bits, armed with everything from knitting needles to a spork, into the storm sewers of San Fransciso.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from A Dirty Job

“Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from The Girl on the Train

“Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.
“I thought you must be dead …” he said simply.
“So did I for a while,” said Ford, “and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Life, the Universe and Everything

“Sometimes words were cheap. They could be powerful, but in those rare occasions like now, words meant nothing.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Origin

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