East of Eden Quotes

“I think perhaps Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all of its paradoxes and its reverses. She did not like death but she knew it existed, and when it came it did not surprise her.
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, hut he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
To Liza it was simply death—the thing promised and expected. She could go on and in her sorrow put a pot of beans in the oven, bake six pies, and plan to exactness how much food would be necessary properly to feed the funeral guests. And she could in her sorrow see that Samuel had a clean white shirt and that his black broadcloth was brushed and free of spots and his shoes blacked. Perhaps it takes these two kinds to make a good marriage, riveted with several kinds of strengths.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbours had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You're not clever. You don't know what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other people walk over you. Sometimes I think you're a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does that answer your question? I love you better. I always have.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in.
silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton)”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Lee, I’m not good enough for him.”
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
“I’m not being funny. He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the made-up one.”
“What’s she like?”
“Pure!” said Abra. “Just absolutely pure. Nothing but pure—never a bad thing. I’m not like that.”
“Nobody is,” said Lee.
“He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t even want to know me. He wants that—white—ghost.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite…. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Samuel said that Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son’s quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him, for Samuel had no violence—even when he hit Adam Trask with his fist he had no violence. And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly—well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book
and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands. Violence and shyness—Tom’s loins needed women and at the same time he did not think himself worthy of a woman. For long periods he would welter in a howling celibacy, and then he would take a
train to San Francisco and roll and wallow in women, and then he would come silently back to the ranch, feeling weak and unfulfilled and unworthy, and he would punish himself with work, would plow and plant unprofitable land, would cut tough oakwood until his back was breaking and his arms were weary rags.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Adam wet his dry lips and tried to ask and failed and tried again. "Why do they have to do it?" he said. "Why is it?"

Cyrus was deeply moved and he spoke as he had never spoken before. "I don't know," he said. "I've studied and maybe learned how things are, but I"m not even close to why they are. And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws into a stream to fool dogs. A fox can't say why he does it, and what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again? When I knew you had to go I thought to leave the future open so you could dig out your own findings, and then it seemed better if I could protect you with the little I know. You'll go in soon now--you've come to the age."

"I don't want to," said Adam quickly.

"You'll go in soon," his father went on, not hearing. "And I want to tell you so you won't be surprised. They'll first strip off your clothes, but they'll go deeper than that. They'll shuck off any little dignity you have--you'll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and be let alone to live. They'll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you'll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can't even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, 'This is me--separate from the rest.'"

"I don't want to do it," said Adam.

"After a while," said Cyrus, "you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever-- a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men."

"What if I don't?" Adam demanded.

"Yes," said Cyrus, "sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside--neither part of themselves nor yet free. It's better to fall in with them. They only do it to protect themselves [...]”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man bor without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Someone's got to do these things,' he said sullenly. 'Or else fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I’d think there are degrees of greatness,” Adam said.


“I don’t think so,” said Samuel. “That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility - that hugeness - you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“in 50 years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Dessie's friends were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You’re pretty full of yourself. You’re marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask—Caleb the
magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself
as a snot-nose kid—mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and
curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside
of that you’re very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to
yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother,
will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer, snot-nose?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“She was a very small girl with a face as lovely and fresh as her son’s face—a very small girl. Most of the time she knew she was smarter and prettier than anyone else. But now and then a lonely fear would fall upon her so that she seemed surrounded by a tree-tall forest of enemies. Then every thought and word and look was aimed to hurt her, and she had no place to run and no place to hide. And she would cry in panic because there was no escape and no sanctuary.

Then one day she was reading a book—brown, with a silver title, and the cloth was broken and the boards thick. It was Alice in Wonderland. But it was the bottle which said, “Drink me” that had changed her life.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out. This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We're a violent people, Cal. Does it seem strange to you that I include myself? Maybe it's true, that we are all descendants of the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers, and brawlers. But also the brave, and independent, and generous. If our ancestors hadn't been that, they would've stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There’s a passage in John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” that does a pretty good job describing California’s rainfall patterns:

The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ...”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden