"Cannery Row" Quotes

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

It's all always a little hard to get across in words. Like the moment when you play a tune and there's a point in it that is right in the middle and you know it's perfect but you can't tell someone else why.

There's something about a woman with a loud voice that causes a man to talk about her rather than to her.

It has always been difficult for a man to know what he isn't supposed to know, but the difficulty today is enormous because so much is known.

The thing we tell of can never be told. It is a secret, and the more we try to tell it the plainer it becomes to us that it is a secret. And then we realize that what we tell is not the secret, but only a story about it.

Men seem able to respond to the more direct of the arts. They admire the pictures, the sculpture, the songs, the architecture, but writing is one step too far for them.

One man's unbroken spirit is another man's unbreakable prison.

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system.

Ideas are like baseball. You gotta throw them a curve. The one who keeps it straight loses.

There is no such thing as an immoral woman; the history of the world is full of women who would have been stoned to death if they had been immoral.