East Of Eden
John Steinbeck
'I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one . . . Humans are caught-in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too-in a net of good and evil . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions- Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well-or ill?' 'A novelist who is also a true poet.' Sunday Times 'A testament to the power of Steinbeck's storytelling- to his ferocious will to make sense of his life and his country.' Jonathan Franzen 'Steinbeck's writings form a photograph album of America.' Guardian Also available in this series- The Grapes of Wrath Of Mice and Men The Pearl The Moon is Down
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“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.”
East Of Eden • John Steinbeck
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.”
East Of Eden • John Steinbeck