I’ve tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have som… - John Steinbeck
" "I’ve tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn’t true anymore. Aron didn’t grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn’t stand to have it come out any other way. I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on. We were kind of strangers. We kept it going because we were used to it. But I didn’t believe the story anymore. 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. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too. He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s not how he wanted the story to go — and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world.
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About John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (27 February 1902 – 20 December 1968) was an American writer. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, his works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Birth Name:
Jeffery Ernest Steinbeck
Alternative Names:
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.
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John Ernst Steinbeck
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John Ernest Steinbeck
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John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
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Steinbeck
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Additional quotes by John Steinbeck
I seen fellas like you before. You ain’t askin’ nothin’; you’re jus’ singin’ a kinda song. ‘What we comin’ to?’ You don’ wanta know. Country’s movin’ aroun’, goin’ places. They’s folks dyin’ all aroun’. Maybe you’ll die pretty soon, but you won’t know nothin’. I seen too many fellas like you. You don’t want to know nothin’. Just sing yourself to sleep with a song — ‘What we comin’ to?
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What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate and bifocals?Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped,, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come to bad ends, blot-on-the town-thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the town and bums,, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.
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