You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?
John SteinbeckStrange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.
John SteinbeckYou stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.
John SteinbeckThen it is better, sir, to love whom one cannot have?" "Probably better," Lancelot said. "Certainly safer.
John SteinbeckI have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.
John SteinbeckI suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.
John Steinbeck