John Steinbeck Quotes About Water

Quotes about: Water

• I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

  John Steinbeck

  Prayer, Writing, Color

  John Steinbeck (1990). “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters”, p.12, Penguin

• Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fences, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our own hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

  John Steinbeck

  Strong, Fall, Angel

• A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.

  John Steinbeck

  Snakes, Water, Shadow

• When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

  John Steinbeck

  Book, Writing, Marine

  "Cannery Row".

• You never oughta drink water when it ain't runnin'.

  John Steinbeck

  Water, Drink, Drink Water

  John Steinbeck (1994). “Of Mice and Men”, p.20, Penguin

• It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

  John Steinbeck

  Hands, Water, Black

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.116, Penguin

• A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.

  John Steinbeck

  Running, Book, Rivers

  John Steinbeck (1965). “Of mice and men”, Bantam

• Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.

  John Steinbeck

  Water, Desert, Sun

  John Steinbeck (1980). “Travels with Charley in Search of America”, p.120, Penguin

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