"Travels With Charley"

[fiefoe]

<People Steinbeck met on the road:>

• (The boy's) words wrestled their way hellbent through his shyness.
• "Nobody knows. What good's an opinion if you don't know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty's beard. I don't even know what happened ... alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that makes a rock or a table. I don't even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We've got nothing to go on-got no way to think about things."
• I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."
• A bedizened woman .. emerged from the car with an explosive ooze.
• (The preacher) put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity.<> He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This (hell had...) a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me.
• Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards.
• "Bless you, no, sir. But to get to be people they must fight those who aren't satisfied to be people. <...> The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident."
  

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