The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.

This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".

A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.

The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.

A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.