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John Steinbeck |
The murder things, emeralds,
diamonds, and gold;
the sins of men,
committed for them,
make them haunt the ocean.
Folly and distorted vision are
the foundations of greatness.
Battle and tactics are nothing more
than glorified trickery. War is won
by the man who sits back,
like one cheating at cards,
and confounds his
enemy with
trickery.
If he were perfectly honest
and gave a strict accounting in nine consecutive dealings,
then the tenth time he might steal as much as he wished,
and no one would dream of suspecting him, so only he
had brought the nine times forcibly to the attention
of all men.
He never stole anything. Theft is criminal. He would never
steal but he did pay tribute to himself.
Modesty is only a kind of beauty patch which is put on
when there are visitors.
Honesty may be a ladder to a higher, more valuable crime.
France, Britain, and Holland had seen in these islands
a good hermitage for their criminals, and for years
they unloaded worthless human freight on the Indies.
The mountains are a kind of poultice for a man's
abstract pain, among them he laughs,
far more than he cries.
She was beautiful, truly, but hers was the harsh,
dangerous beauty of lightning.
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| Inverted but Quotable |
The most human
of all traits is inconsistency.
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Footnotes
In 1940, Scott Fitzgerald said CUP OF GOLD was his favorite Steinbeck novel.
By then, John Steinbeck had written nine novels, the most recent–published in 1939–
was Grapes of Wrath.
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