Dessie was not beautiful. Perhaps she wasn’t even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it.
Then Samuel died and the world shattered like a dish.
Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
Come along”, said Joad. “Pa’ll be glad to see you. He always said you got too long a pecker for a preacher”. He picked up his coat roll and tightened it snugly about his shoes and turtle.
Didn’t know anyone could see it,” Samuel said. “You know, Lee, I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only – and that note unchanging sorrow. I’m not alone in my attitude, Lee. It seems to me that too many of us conceive of a life as ending in defeat.
A few nights in the open, my lord, a quiet time and peace. Yes, I admit I am glad. It was good, but it is also good to be alone. We need not hurry. At the end is a tomb. Do we need to rush toward it? It will wait.
It’s need that makes all the trouble.
Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I want to hold on to. That’s not true of course – just a feeling like the quick one of hexing your trip so you couldn’t go. The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
I tell those stories, but they’re not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them. It wasn’t Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering.
A light in the daytime is a lonely thing.
How could I compete with a debtless man?
It was then that Doc devised a method for getting revenge on a bank if anyone should ever want to. ‘Rent a safety deposit box,’ he said, ’then deposit in it one whole fresh salmon and go away for six months.
Sometimes it rose to an aching chord that caught the throat, saying this is the safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.
He’s lonelier than you are because he has no lovely future to dream about.
I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home. I’ve never been so goddam lonesome in my life.
Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody to be near him.
It’s all right not to believe in luck and omens. Nobody believes in them. But it doesn’t do any good to take chances with them and no one takes chances.
It was Una,” he said hoarsely. “He couldn’t get over Una. He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing.
In a small town where everyone knows everyone it is almost impossible to believe that one of your acquaintance could murder anyone. For that reason, if the signs are not pretty strong in a particular direction, it must be some dark stranger, some wanderer from the outside world where such things happen.