John Steinbeck Quotes

I've always had this deep and chronic sense of dissatisfaction.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

The last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.

The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

When you're away, I'm restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only here's the rub, my darling dear, I feel the same when you're near.

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.

I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.

Since my life has been wayward and impulsive, always a search for something that is not there, and then disillusionment, I believe I need all the excuses I can make.

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

I felt incomplete. I was always happy but I felt incomplete and that I needed to be pushing through.

I never want to be satisfied.

If you desire, you are restless.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

Tired of myself longing for what I have not

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest.

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.