John Steinbeck Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Men, Wrath

  John Steinbeck (2016). “The Grapes of Wrath”, p.190, Hamilton Books

• When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always 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. 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 is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

  John Steinbeck

  Wise, Jobs, Children

• Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

  John Steinbeck

  Mother, Children, Parenting

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.132, Penguin

• It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Knowledge, Science

  John Steinbeck (1943). “Steinbeck”

• 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

  Strong, Hurt, Laughter

• We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields?

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Science, Fields

  John Steinbeck (1995). “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”, p.80, Penguin

• New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

  John Steinbeck

  New York, Children, Dirty

  John Steinbeck (2003). “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction”, p.44, Penguin

• When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, People, Ghost

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.506, Penguin

• 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

  Horse, Children, Men

• I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Thinking, Joy

  John Steinbeck (1980). “Travels with Charley in Search of America”, p.25, Penguin

• The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Home, Men

  John Steinbeck (1995). “To a God Unknown”, p.70, Penguin

• A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete.

  John Steinbeck

  Thank You, Children, Wife

• Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, People, Effort

  John Steinbeck (2008). “The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.10, Penguin

• I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Wall, Reading

  John Steinbeck (1980). “Travels with Charley in Search of America”, p.93, Penguin

• A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

  John Steinbeck

  Children, Fall, Men

  John Steinbeck (1980). “Travels with Charley in Search of America”, p.15, Penguin

• The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.

  John Steinbeck

  Country, Dream, Lonely

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