John Dupras

“A man’s mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden