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 brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots.
The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic.
“Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself?
I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans.
“Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist.
“Well, c’mere,” he said softly.
My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door.
He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did.
“Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio.
“Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness.
“So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?”
I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me.
He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors.
Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened.
And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor.
“R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched.
“Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug.
“Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him.
It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.”
― Ree Drummond, quote from The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

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