John Steinbeck

"The silence between words often carries more meaning than the words themselves."

"A man's legacy is not what he accumulates but what he leaves behind."

"The sad thing about any man is he is sure to do it again."

"We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome."

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of action, we should take the one which we think will be less destructive."

"A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here is ever so alive."

"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears."

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

"I fear I am a boring old man. Perhaps that is because I am so interested in so many things."

"When a man says he does not believe in a thing, he is not ignorant—he is resistive."

"The person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"Time is the only critic without ambition."

"There is a natural law against forcing anything long-time. Sometimes the penalty is casually delivered a long long time after the offense."

"A sad soul can kill you just as surely as a germ."

"The cat is out of the bag, and there's no use trying to put it back."

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."

"I have a new love. It's a planet, but not this one."

"The conflict between power and love is the never-ending conflict."

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike."

"The craft or art of writing is the clotting of the chaos of experience into something concrete and shaped."

"In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future, and bonds to one another."

"All of us contain selves of indefinable depth and breadth and height."

"We are not going to have things done to us. We are going to do them."

"The greatest boon to the human race has been the discovery that patience is a virtue."

"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."

"I understand that every man wants what he cannot have."

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning."

"The artist is the lover of nature; therefore he is her slave and her master."