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Steinbeck: A Life in Letters QUOTES

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters QUOTES

21 " Oh! honey–I feel sick. I guess maybe it is the subsurface panting because you are not here. "

― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

22 " Well, I went into the mountains and stayed two years. I was snowed in eight months of the year and saw no one except my two Airedales. There were millions of fir trees and the snow was deep and it was very quiet. And there was no one to pose for any more. You can’t have a show with no audience. Gradually all the poses slipped off and when I came out of the hills I didn’t have any poses any more. It was rather sad, but it was far less trouble. I am happier than I have ever been in my life. "

― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

23 " Religion is a phalanx emotion and this was so clearly understood by the church fathers that they said the holy ghost would come when two or three were gathered together. You have heard about the trickiness of the MOB. Mob is simply a phalanx, but if you try to judge a mob nature by the nature of its men units, you will fail as surely as if you tried to understand a man by studying one of his cells. You will say you know all this. Of course you do. It has to be written in primer language. All tremendous things do. "

― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

24 " We can find no man unit reason for the sudden invasion of Europe by a race of Hun shepherds, who were transformed overnight into a destroying force, a true phalanx, and in another generation had become shepherds again, so weak that an invasion of Tartars overwhelmed them. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden migration of the Mayas. We say Attila did it or Ghenghis Khan, but they couldn’t. They were simply the spokesmen of the movement. Hitler did not create the present phalanx in Germany, he merely interprets it. "

― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters