Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 9 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

“And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality....

“I wanted blind force—blind, unreasoning force—and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness. I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I love you,” he said miserably.

“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Henry released her and stepped away, wiping his bloody face with the back of his hand. Ysobel laughed at him. A man may beat—may subject to every violation—a woman who cries and runs away, but he is helpless before one who stands her ground and only laughs.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“It is a legend that dying men think of their deeds done. No— No— I think of what I have not done—of what I might have done in the years that are dying with me. I think of the lips of women I have never seen—of the wine that is sleeping in a grape seed—of the quick, warm caress of my mother in Goaves. But mostly I think that I shall never walk about again—never, never stroll in the sunshine nor smell the rich essences the full moon conjures up out of the earth— Sir, why did you do it?”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold