East of Eden by John Steinbeck
"The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil."
"Maybe if I had loved him I would have been jealous of him. You were. Maybe- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself? I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you."
"A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honest is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous."
"Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."
"Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy."
" 'Do you have hatred?' 'No, No- only a kind of sinking in the heart. Maybe later I'll sort it out to hatred. There was no interval from loveliness to horror, you see. I'm confused, confused.' Samuel said, 'One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now- why, you can't find all the cards.'"
" 'Did she mean to kill you?' 'I've thought of that more than anything else. No, I don't think she meant to kill me. She didn't allow me that dignity. There was no hatred in her, no passion at all. I learned about that in the army. If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach. No, she hit me where she intended. I can see the gun barrel moving over. I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if she had wanted my death. That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.' 'You've given it a lot of thought,' said Samuel. 'I've had lots of time for it. I want to ask you something. I can't remember behind the last ugly thing. Was she very beautiful, Samuel?' 'To you she was because you built her. I don't think you ever saw her- only your own creation.' "
"'You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people thing it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.'"
"And of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule- a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting- only the deeply personal and familiar."
"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind."
