The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
John SteinbeckYou stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.
John SteinbeckA funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.
John SteinbeckIt occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
John Steinbeck