He liked to think he was in on the secrets she had. When she smiled slyly, he smiled slyly too, and they exchanged confidences in whispers. The world had drawn close around them, and they were in the center of it, or rather Rose of Sharon was in the center of it with Connie making a small orbit about her. Everything they said was a kind of secret.
John SteinbeckTags: grapes-of-wrath
But us, we got a job to do, and there's a thousand ways, and we don't know which one to take. And if I was to pray, it'd be for the folks that don't know which way to turn.
John SteinbeckThe Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn't very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It ... tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, ... crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live ... In the winter, it becomes a torrent, ... and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.
John SteinbeckAnd when a man's feelings are hurt he wants to strike at something, and Abel was in the way of his anger.
John SteinbeckI got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's
why.
Tags: friendship friends
Cause I can jus' as well go away, George, an' live in a cave.
"You can jus' as well go to hell," said George. "Shut up now.
Well, what you ding this kind of work for--against your own people?"
"Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner--and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day and it comes every day."
"But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?"
"Can't think of that. Got to think of my own kids."
***
"Nearly a hundred people on the road for your three dollars. Where will we go?"
"And that reminds me, you better get out soon. I'm going through the dooryard after dinner...I got orders wherever there's a family not moved out--if I have an accident--you know, get too close and cave in the house a little--well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet."
"I built this with my hands...It's mine. I built it. You bump it down--I'll be in the window with a rifle..."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look--suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but not long before you're hung there'll be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
***
Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall and wrenched the house from its foundation so that it fell sideways,crushed like a bug...The tenant man stared after [the tractor], his rifle in his hand. His wife beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.
Tags: reality-of-life
Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money- unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime. p.19
John SteinbeckTags: woman pragmatic remarrying
Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have.
John SteinbeckIt set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.”
“That’s lonely.”
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
“What is the word again?”
“Timshel—thou mayest.
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