the dog-eared pages of john steinbeck

I have a nasty habit of dog-earing the best loved pages of any book that I read, library books included. So, before I return John Steinbeck's East of Eden to the Woodstock library, I figure I will take a moment to document a few of my favorite passages:

Time interval is a strange and contradictory manner in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy --that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all. (pg. 54)

One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children has been dishonest. (pg. 252)

He looked up at the sky. "Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life --so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do. No," he said, "I'm having enjoyment. And I made a promise to myself that I would not consider enjoyment a sin. I take a pleasure in inquiring into things. I've never been content to pass a stone without looking under it. And it is a black disappointment to me that I can never see the far side of the moon." (pg. 265)

...And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly --well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and be balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, can came up with the book all over his face and hands. (pg. 280)

"I can't tell you how to live your life," Samuel said, "although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining --small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age." (pg. 294)