East of Eden Quotes

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

You don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.

There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

We should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. 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 the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.