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“ ”American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.
About John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (27 February 1902 – 20 December 1968) was an American writer. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, his works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Shorter versions of this quote
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
Additional quotes by John Steinbeck
Porque se dice que los humanos no se satisfacen jamás, que se les da una cosa y siempre quieren algo más. Y se dice esto con erróneo desprecio, ya que es una de las mayores virtudes que tiene la especie y que la hace superior a los animales que se dan por satisfechos con lo que tienen.
When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.