Kerri > Kerri's Quotes

“No" is a complete sentence.”
― Annie Lamott

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

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
― John Steinbeck, شرق بهشت

“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”
― John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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

“Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself? ”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven

“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, The Winter of Our Discontent

“She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt or fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials....She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.”
― John Steinbeck

“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“[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, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”
― John Steinbeck

“Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them…I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb."
"You can’t make a race horse of a pig."
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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

“As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.”
― Mae West