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

—John Steinbeck

About John Steinbeck

Portrait of John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck ( STYNE-bek; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer and novelist. He was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of...

More quotations from John Steinbeck

Even when I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

—John Steinbeck

When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

—John Steinbeck

justice wisdom learning intelligence safety gods childhood growth lying parental infallibility

If the solution to a problem of absolute disagreement extends to a call for bloodshed, then neither party has demonstrated the intelligence to formulate the question properly.

—John Steinbeck

war wisdom intelligence disagreement

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

—John Steinbeck

reality gratitude memory past perception bounty

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—'Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.'

—John Steinbeck

commonality loneliness stories

More quotations tagged with “ideas”

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

—Jim Hightower

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

—J. B. S. Haldane

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

—Hyman Rickover

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action—I will write it out.

—Hortense Calisher

History

11 Jul 2015 Added