STEINBECK, John - East of Eden

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 1, section 1

And that was the long Salinas Valley. Its history was like that of the rest of the state. First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish. They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for flour. Even their warfare was a weary pantomime.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 1, section 2

Samuel had a great black book on an available shelf and it had gold letters on the cover – Dr Gunn’s Family Medicine. Some pages were bent and beat up from us, and others were never opened to the light. To look through Dr Gunn is to know the Hamiltons’ medical history.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 2, section 1

Liza had a finely dev eloped sense of sin. Idleness was a sin, and card playing, which was a kind of idleness to her. She was suspicious of fun, whether it involved dancing or singing or even laughter. She felt that people having a good time were wide open to the devil.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 3, section 1

Cyrus soon solved the problem. He dipped a rag in whisky and gave it to the baby to suck, and after three or four dippings young Adam went to sleep. Several times during the mourning period he awakened and complained and got the dipped rag again and went to sleep. The baby was drunk for two days and a half.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 3, section 2

When a child first catches adults out – when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just – his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 3, section 2

Towards Alice Trask, Adam concealed a feeling that was akin to a warm shame. She was not his mother – that he knew because he had been told many times. Not from things said but from the tone in which other things were said. And he knew that he and once had a mother and she had done some shameful things, such a forgetting the chickens or missing the target on the rage in the wood-lot. As a result of her fault she was not here.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 3, section 2

Cyrus stumped over to him and grasped him by the arm so fiercely that he winced and tried to pull away. ‘Don’t lie to me! Why did he do it? Did you have an argument?’
“No.”
Cyrus wrench at him, ’Tell me! I want to know. Tell me! You’ll have to tell me. I’ll make you tell me! … you’re always protecting him! Don’t you think I know that? Did you think you were fooling me? …’
Adam cast about for an answer. ‘He doesn’t think you love him.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 3, section 4

When Cyrus stumped out into the night he was filled with a kind of despairing anger at Charles. He looked on the road for his son, and he went to the inn to look for him, but Charles was gone. It is probably that if he had found him that night he would have killed him, or tried to. 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 finger-nail nicked in the garden soil.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 4, section 1

During the five years of soldiering Adam did more detail work than any man in the squadron, but if he killed an enemy it was an accident of ricochet. Being a marksman and sharpshooter, he was peculiarly fitted to miss. By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle-drives; the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice wok, but given the pattern of the country’s development, it had to be done.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 4, section 2

When he fired his carbine to miss he was committing treason against his unit, and he didn’t care. The emotion of non-violence was building in him until it became a prejudice like any other thought-stultifying prejudiced. To inflict any hurt on anything for any purpose became inimical to him.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 4, section 2

Charles wrote to his brother regularly… As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
During the time Adam was away he knew his brother better than ever before or afterwards. In the exchange of letters there grew a closeness neither of them could have imagined.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 4, section 2

If Samuel had been a rich man like the Thornes or the Delmars, with their big houses and wide flat lands, he would have had a great library.
The Delmars had a library – nothing but book in it and paneled in oak. Samuel, by borrowing, had read many more of the Delmar’s books than the Delmars had. In that day and educated rich man was acceptable.  … But a poor man- what need had he for poetry or for painting or for music not fit for singing or dancing. Such things did not help him bring in a crop or keep a scrap of cloth on his children’s back.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 5

Certain individuals, not by any means always deserving, are truly beloved of the gods. Things come to them without their effort or planning. Will Hamilton was one of these. And the gifts he received were the one she could appreciate. As a growing boy Will was lucky. Just as his father could not make money, Will could not help making it.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 5

Adam felt that he was sleep-walking. It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it. In the morning he awakened on a split second and lay awaiting reveille.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 6, section 2

He didn’t want to go home and he put it off as long as possible. Home was not a pleasant place in his mind. The kind of feelings he had had there were dead in him, and he had reluctance to bring them to life.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 6, section 2

She was a clean, mean old woman. She looked at the dust-grey rotting curtains, threw them out, and made new ones. She dug grease out of the stove that had been there since Charles’s mother died. And she leached the walls of a brown shiny nastiness deposited by cooking-fat and kerosene lamps. She pickled the floors with lye, soaked the blankets in sal soda, complaining the whole time to herself, ‘Men- dirty animals. Pigs is clean compared. Rot in their own juice. Don’t see how no woman ever marries them. Stink like measles. Look at oven – pie juice from Methusaleah.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 6, section 3

He learned Spanish words for food and pleasure, and he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself. And by now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle. Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 7, section 1

There hadn’t been anyone to send him a telegram. They were sorry – offered their condolences. And they were pretty excited too. When they had made Trask’s will they thought he might have a few hundred dollars to leave his sons. That is what he looked to be worth. When they inspected his bank-books they found that he had over ninety-three thousand dollars in the bank and ten thousand dollars in good securities. They felt very different about Mr. Task then. People with that much money were rich.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 7, section 2

Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 12

What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 13, section 1

Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but he group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 13, section 1

He’s been west before, tough – in the army, fighting Indians.’
‘Were you now? Then it’s you should talk and let me learn.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Why not? God help my family and my neighbours if I had fought the Indians!’
‘I didn’t want to fight them, sir.’ The ‘sir’ crept in without his knowing it.’
‘Yes, I can understand that. It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don’t know and don’t hate.’
‘Maybe that makes it easier,’ said Louis.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 13, section 3

In her school there were pupils older and bigger than she was. It required great tact to be a school-teacher. To keep order among the big undisciplined boys without pistol and bull whip was a difficult and dangerous business. In one school in the mountains a teacher was raped by her pupils.  Olive Hamilton had not only to teach everything, but to all ages. Very few youths went past the eighth grade in those days, and what with farm duties some of them took fourteen or fifteen years to do it. Olive had also to practices a rudimentary medicine, for there were constant accidents. She sewed up knife cuts after a fight in the school-yard. When a small barefooted boy was bitten by a rattle snake, it was her duty to suck his toe to draw the poison out.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

In addition, the whole social life of the area was in her hands, not only graduation exercises, but dances, meetings, debates, chorals, Christmas and May Day festivals, patriotic exudations on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. She was on the election board and headed and held together all charities. It was far from an easy job, and it had duties and obligations beyond belief. The teacher had no private life. She was watched jealously for any weakness of character.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

Teachers rarely lasted very long in the country schools. The work was so hard and the proposals so constant that they married within a very short time. This was a course Olive Hamilton determined she would not take. She did not share the intellectual enthusiasms of her father, but the time she had spent in Salinas determined her not to be a ranch wife.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

As she grew older she developed a scattergun method for dealing with unpleasant facts. When I, her only son, was sixteen I contracted pleural pneumonia, in that day a killing disease. I went down and down, until the wing-tips of the angels brushed my eyes. Olive used her scattergun method of treating pleural pneumonia, and it worked. The Episcopalian minister prayed with and for me, the Mother Superior and nuns of the convent next to our house held me up to Heaven for relief twice a day, a distant relative who was a Christian Science reader held the thought for me. Every incantation, magic, and herbal formula known was brought out, and she got two good nurses and the town’s best doctors. Her method was practical. I got well.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

She was loving and firm with her family, three girls and me, trained us to housework, dishwashing, clothes-washing, and manners. When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of the month was a debt. The world had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor. … She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic patter where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1

‘Look, Samuel, I mean to make a garden of my land. Remember my name is Adam. So far I’ve had no Eden, let along been driven out.’
‘It’s the best reason I ever heard for making a garden,’ Samuel exclaimed.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 15, section 3

Adam seemed clothes in a viscosity that slowed his movements and held his thoughts down. He saw the world through grey water. Now and then his mind fought is way upwards, and when the light broke in it brought him only a sickness of the mind, and he retired into the greyness again. He was aware of the twins because he heard them cry and laugh, but he felt only a think distaste for them. To Adam they were symbols of his loss.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 1

Shyly Samuel told his wife he wanted to visit the Trask place. He thoughts she would pile up strong walls of objection, and for one of the few times in his life he would disobey her wish no matter how strong her objection. It gave him a sad feeling in the stomach to think of disobeying his wife. He explains is purpose almost as though he were confessing.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 2

Could I take the Bible along?’ he asked. ‘There’s no place for getting a good name like the Bible.’
‘I don’t’ much like it out of the house,’ she said uneasily. ‘And if you’re late coming home, what’ll I have for my reading? And the children’s names are in it.’ She saw his face fall. She went into the bedroom and came back with a small Bible, worn and scuffed, its cover held on by brown paper and glue. “Take this one,’ she said.
‘But that’s your mother’s.’
‘She wouldn’t mind.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 2

‘And I warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in the. They will be what you expect of them.’
‘But their blood –‘
‘I don’t very much believe in blood,’ said Samuel. ‘I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.’
‘You can’t make a racehorse of a pig.’
‘No,” said Samuel, ‘but you can make a very fast pig.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 3

‘Did you listen? Cain bore the mark not to destroy him but to save him. And there’s a curse down on any man who shall kill him. It was a preserving mark.’
Adam said, ‘I can’t get over a feeling that Cain got the dirty end of the stick.’
‘Maybe he did,’ said Samuel. ‘But Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain’s children. And isn’t it strange that three grown men, here in a century so many thousands of years away, discuss this crime as though it happened in King City yesterday and hadn’t come up for trial?’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 4

I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now – don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 22, section 4

The Hamiltons were strange, high-strung people, and some of them were tuned too high and they snapped. This happens often in the world.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 23, section 1

And then Dessie fell in love. I do not know any details of her love affair – who the man was or what the circumstances, whether it was a religion or a living wife, a disease or a selfishness. I guess my mother knew, but it was one of those things put away in the family closet and never brought out. And if other people in Salinas knew, they must have kept it a loyal town secret. All I do know is that it was a hopeless thing, grey and terrible.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 23, section 1

On Thanksgiving of 1911, the family gathered at the ranch – all the children except Joe, who was in New York, and Lizzie, who had left eh family and joined another, and Una, who was dead. They arrived with presents and more food than even this clan could eat. They were all married save Dessie and Tom. Their children filled the Hamilton place with riot. The home place flared up – noisier than it had ever been. The children cried and screamed and fought.  Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 23, section 2

They all wanted to say the same thing – all ten of them. Samuel was an old man. It was as startling a discovery as the sudden seeing of a ghost. Somehow they had not believed it could happen. They drank their whisky and talk softly of the new thought.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 23, section 2

I have wondered why it is that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death than others.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

I think perhaps Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all its paradoxes and its reverses. She did not like death but she knew it existed, and when it came it did not surprise her.
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

She was gay and frightened about eh visit to Salinas. She liked the idea so well that she felt that there must be something  bordering on sin involved in it.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

Places were very important to Samuel. The ranch was a relative, and when he left it he plunged a knife into a darling. But having made up his mind, Samuel set about doing it well. He made formal calls on all of his neighbours, the old-timers who remembered how it used to be and how it was. And when he drove away from his old friends they knew they would not see him again, although he did not say it.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

‘You know how it is,’ Samuel said. ‘When you know a friend is there you do not go to seek him. Then he’s gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

‘The sweetness of your offer is a good smell on the west wind.’
‘Then you’ll do it?’
‘No, I will not do it. But I’ll see it in my mind when I’m in Salinas, listening to William Jennings Bryan. And maybe I’ll get to believe it happened.’
 Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 1

‘Why didn’t you want the boys to learn Chines, Adam?’
Adam thought for a moment. ‘It seems a time for honesty,’ he said at last. ‘I guess it was plain jealousy. I gave it another name, but maybe I didn’t want them to be able so easily to go away from me in a direction I couldn’t follow.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 24, section 2

Dessie did not simply throw up her hands and give up. It was much worse than that. She went right on doing and being what she was – without the glow. The people who had loved her ached for her, seeing her try, and they got to trying for her.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 32, section 1

Dessie’s friend were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 32, section 1

Dessie’s business began to fall off. And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness. Times were changing and the ready-made dress was becoming popular. It was no longer a disgrace to wear one.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 32, section 1

The sharpest question she had asked, ‘How does it feel not to have a mother?’ slipped into his mind. And how did it feel? It didn’t feel like anything. Ah, but in the schoolroom, at Christmas and graduation, when the mothers of other children came to the parties – then was the silent cry and the wordless longing. That’s what it was like.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 36, section 3

Salinas was surrounded and penetrated with swamps, with tule-filled ponds, and every pond spawned thousands of frogs. With the evening the air was so full of their song that I was kind of a roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, after a clap of thunder, was a shocking thing.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 36, section 3

Lee jumped up. ‘You stop that!’ he said sharply. ‘You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other two. Here – look up! Look at me!’
Cal raised his head and said wearily, ‘What do you want?’
“You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now – look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it – not your mother.’
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 38, section 3

A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 42

Marty Hopps was dead, the Berges boy, from across the street, the handsome one our little sister was in love with from the time she was three, blown to bits! And the gangling, shuffling, loose-jointed boys carrying suitcase were marching awkwardly down Main Street to the Southern Pacific Depot. They were sheepish, and the Salinas Band marched ahead of them, playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the families walking along beside them were crying, and the music sounded like a dirge. The draftee wouldn’t look at their mothers. They didn’t dare. We’d never thought the war could happen to us.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 42

The German army was so far superior to ours that we didn’t have a chance.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 42

NOTE
Narrator is Olive Hamilton’s son.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Chapter 5
Olive Hamilton became a teacher, left home at 15, lived in Salinas. Didn’t want to settle there.
Longed for the metropolitan life.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 2, Chapter 14, section 1
His name is John Hamilton
Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 3, Chapter 23, section 1