Sam Eichhorn

“Doc went back to the laboratory and poured out a glass of beer. He drank the first off for thirst and poured a second one for taste.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“I have further established, at least to my own satisfaction, that those states with the shortest histories and the least world-shaking events have the most historical markers.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America