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

About the author

Popular quotes

“And I knew the point of love right then.
The point of love was to help you survive.
The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was.”
― Matt Haig, quote from The Humans

“That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.”
― Nick Harkaway, quote from The Gone-Away World

“All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.”
― Joseph Campbell, quote from Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

“Was true love when you wanted to slap someone and kiss him madly at the same time?”
― Nancy Werlin, quote from Impossible

“My job is never boring," Staples said. "There's nuts-and-bolts stuff like getting the tarpaulin over the shaft when it rains, and so in. Cataloging and reshelving. The shelves are in a shocking state. And when you've got everything ever written or lost to keep track of, it's quite a job. And there's fetching books.

"I used to really look forward to requests for books way down in the abyss. We'd all rope up, follow our lines down for miles. The order falls apart a way down but you learn to sniff out class-marks. Sometimes we'd be gone for weeks, fetching volumes.' She spoke with a faraway voice.

"There are risks. Hunters, animals, and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets separated. Twenty years ago, I was in a group looking for a book someone had requested. I remember, it was called 'Oh, All Right Then': Bartleby Returns. We were led by Ptolemy Yes. He was the man taught me. Best librarian there's ever been, some say.

"Anyway, after weeks of searching, we ran out of food and had to turn back. No one likes it when we fail, so none of us were feeling great.

"We felt that much worse when we realized that we'd lost Ptolemy.

"Some people say he went off deliberately. That he couldn't bear not to find the book. That he's out there still in the Wordhoard Abyss, living off shelf-monkeys, looking. And that he'll be back one day, book in his hand.”
― China Miéville, quote from Un Lun Dun

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.