Quoting a Classic
While we’re on the topic of dead authors, here are some of my favorite quotes from John Steinbeck in East Of Eden:
She must have had a pelvic arch of a whalebone, for she had big children one after the other.
When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child.
He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day.
“There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
The thoughts came timidly up to the surface like children who do not know whether they will be received.
Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops.
No one ever had enough [love]. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much.
If chickens had government and church and history, they would take a distant and distasteful view of human joy. Let any … hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie.
People are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And I here make a rule – a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting – only the deeply personal and familiar.
It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true thing would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?
In our time, when a man dies – if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments – the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.