I
have not read John Steinbeck’s novel East
of Eden, but I came across this beautiful quote from it. It’s one of those novels I’ve been meaning to
read.
A
child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder,
“What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the
story about?”
I
believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened
and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought
and wonder. Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their
hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and
generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we
have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and
vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric
of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and
mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has
brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean
questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?
~ John Steinbeck
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