Elizabeth Diaz’s Reviews > East of Eden > Status Update

“I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second.” - Same, Samuel. Same.

“You have a point, Louis. But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.” - TELL ‘EM

Fucking. Cathy.

She raised her hand to her head. “You know I’m not sure I can think straight. And I want to.”
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Cathy is so dramatic and I am so here for it. Also, Steinbeck is making me want to move out west again.

“The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”

Nothing is mundane and I will DIE ON THAT HILL

“And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It’s is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite while again. It is an aching kind of growing.”

OUCH GODDAMN

“When a child first. At he’s adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just— his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone.“

TBC next update cuz this is gold and so real

“…I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units— because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back.”

I really really love this notion.