Adapted by Terrence Shank

Kathryn Fuller and Richard Lineback

"Here’s what I think on it — the tractor’s as strong against us as the drought."

"We can work this land as good as anybody. We was raised on it."

"Burned out, blowed out, eat out, tractored out."

"This is a hard life to swallow but I couldn’t just sit back there and look to someone to feed us."

"We ain’t no paupers. We don’t want no relief. But what we do want is a chanst to make an honest living like what we was raised."

"When you gits down to your last bean your backbone and your navel shakes dice to see which gets it."

"Christ, I’ll die before I’ll say I’d bring up a bunch of kids living this way."

"Brother, hit’s pick seventy-five-cent cotton or starve."

"Brother, hit’s pick seventy-five-cent cotton or else."

"Tain’t hardly fair. They holler that we ain’t citizens but their fruit would rot if we didn’t come."

"My boys are American citizens. If war was declared they’d have to fight no matter where they was. I don’t see why we can’t be citizens because we move around with the fruit tryin’ to make a livin’."

"A human being has a right to stand like a tree has a right to stand."

"The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

— John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

"The families, which had been units of which the boundaries were a house at night, a farm by day, changed their boundaries . . . They changed their social life — changed as in the whole universe only man can change. They were not farm men any more, but migrant men. And the thought, the planning, the long staring silence that had gone out to the fields, went now to the roads, to the distance, to the West . . . The wills thrust westward ahead of them, and fears that had once apprehended drought or flood now lingered with anything that might stop the westward crawling."

"This you may say of man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back."

 — John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath