The Grapes of Wrath Quotes

"They’s a car with six men parked down by the euc’lyptus trees, an’ they’s one with four men up that northside road. I ast ’em for a match. They got guns."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. A boy from Weedpatch alerts the committee about a large force of police ready and waiting to storm into the camp. The corruption of law enforcement is shown here, the police being part of a conspiracy to incite a riot in the camp. They are waiting for the signal that agent provocateurs have started the trouble so that police have a reason to move in.

"Deputy sheriffs."
"Got a warrant?"
"We don’t need a warrant if there’s a riot."
"Well, we got no riots here," said the gate guard.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. Corrupt police know exactly when to turn up at Weedpatch camp to quell a riot, because they are involved in the planning of the riot! But the migrant community is one step ahead. They head off the riot by identifying the troublemakers, so denying the police legal cause to enter. All thanks to the leadership of Ezra Huston and his Central Committee and the cool heads of the migrants.

"We ain’t gonna hurt you. Now who tol’ you to come bus’ up our dance?" He waited for a reply. "You’re our own folks," Huston said sadly. "You belong with us. How’d you happen to come? We know all about it," he added.
"Well, goddamn it, a fella got to eat."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. The Farmers’ Association callously exploits the hunger of migrants to recruit three of them to cause trouble for fellow migrants at Weedpatch. But despite their betrayal, Ezra Huston and his Central Committee show their humanity by not hurting them.

"Don’t knife your own folks. We’re tryin’ to get along, havin’ fun an’ keepin’ order. Don’t tear all that down. Jes’ think about it. You’re jes’ harmin’ yourself. Awright, boys, put ’em over the back fence. An’ don’t hurt ’em. They don’t know what they’re doin’."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. Ezra Huston’s forgiveness of the three migrant troublemakers intending to start a riot at Weedpatch echoes the final words of Jesus dying on the cross. According to Luke 23:24 Jesus said: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Migrant leader Huston’s humanity stands in stark contrast to the betrayal of the troublemakers and cruelty of the Farmers’ Association who sent them.

"They’s change a-comin’. I don’ know what. Maybe we won’t live to see her. But she’s a-comin’. They’s a res’less feelin’. Fella can’t figger nothin’ out, he’s so nervous."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. After a riot almost breaks out at Weedpatch, a nervous Pa Joad makes these comments about there being a restless feeling and that changes are on the way. This is foreshadowing of a workers’ revolt and strike in Chapter 26 and the death of labor activist Jim Casy.

"Five thousan’ of ’em jes’ marched through town with their rifles. An’ they had their turkey shoot, an’ then they marched back. An’ that’s all they done. Well, sir, they ain’t been no trouble sence then."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. This quote highlights the idea that groups of people fighting together are stronger than the individual. A man called Black Hat tells Pa Joad how a group of poorly paid mountain men in Ohio joined a union to campaign for better pay. When they were branded as "reds" and threatened with violence, five thousand of them of them armed with guns marched through the town they worked in on a "turkey shoot." As a result the men’s union was accepted.

"I been thinkin’ maybe we ought to git up a turkey shootin’ club an’ have meetin’s ever’ Sunday." The men looked up at him, and then down at the ground, and their feet moved restlessly and they shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 24. A man called Black Hat tells a story about a revolt by workers at rubber companies in Arkon, Ohio. In their fight for better pay they organize themselves into a union and stage a huge "turkey shoot" solidarity march. Black Hat says that it is time for the migrants at Weedpatch to have their own "turkey shoot" rebellion. This is foreshadowing of the workers unity and strike action in Chapter 26.

The Spring is beautiful in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts…The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. The chapter’s opening lines describe an idyllic scene of a Golden State lush with growing fruit and set for a bountiful harvest. The California land is depicted as a pregnant woman about give birth to new life. The color imagery used, "green hills," conjures up a picture of fertility and hope. But as we will soon learn, it is a deceptively beautiful picture. There is an over-abundance of food, much of which will go to waste while many people starve.

All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight. Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge, and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed, the roots…These are great men.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. Here Steinbeck refers to the great scientific minds who succeed in engineering California’s bumper harvest. They help to defeat nature itself by their creation of disease and pest-resistant crops.

The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon’s job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons’ hands and surgeons’ hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. Steinbeck uses a medical metaphor to describe the work of those who graft young trees and vines to help produce California’s bumper crop. He likens them to surgeons.

Grape blossoms shed their tiny petals and the hard little beads become green buttons, and the buttons grow heavy…The year is heavy with produce. And men are proud, for of their knowledge they can make the year heavy. They have transformed the world with their knowledge.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. This chapter uses vivid imagery, including those of fertility, to describe how the land in California produces an abundant harvest. It is largely the result of advances made by clever agricultural scientists. This should sound a note of hope for migrant farmers like the Joads. One would think they would thrive and prosper in such an agricultural paradise. However, as we soon learn, everything is not as it appears. Food goes to waste and is destroyed for commercial reasons in this land of bounty and many people go hungry.

The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide…This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner. This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries, too.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. Steinbeck makes effective use of simile ("like the tide") and personification ("debt creep up…will have choked") to describe the inhumanity of industrialized farming. The small fruit farmer, weighed down by bank debt, is swallowed up by the big farmer, who also happens to own the cannery too.

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. This passage demonstrates the utter failure of the capitalist and economic system in California. Steinbeck write with deadly irony that agricultural science and technology can produce a bumper food harvest, but not the means whereby hungry people can eat it. Jobless migrants and the poor cannot afford to buy the produce. So much of it remains unsold and people go hungry. An inhumane capitalist system produces starvation in a land of plenty. The Pink Floyd song about the Great Depression, <em>Sorrow</em>, references the first line of the passage: "The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land / Plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden sky / A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers / But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking."

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. In California there is a bountiful harvest and over-abundance of food. It goes to waste, because in order to keep up the price the farm owners believe it must be destroyed. We get the horrifying image of "golden mountains" of oranges having kerosene sprayed on them, while a million people go hungry. This is uncontrolled industrial farming and quest for profits run amok, as a corrupt economic system scales new heights of inhumanity. The "smell of rot" not only refers to the wasted food, but also to the rotten system. Steinbeck brands the farmers’ actions a "crime" and speaks of the farm employees’ anger at having to carry it out.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. The farmers in California destroy their crops in order to push up prices. Steinbeck’s reference to putrescence refers to the corruption of an economic and agricultural system that destroys food while people go hungry.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. Steinbeck uses Biblical language in this chapter and passage to describe what he believes is an unspeakable crime against people and nature. Farmers cannot sell their crops because people are too poor to buy them. For many it is more economical to destroy or leave the crops to rot rather than harvest them, leaving people to starve. Farmers cannot make a profit from an orange, so children die of malnutrition, Steinbeck says in his savage indictment of the system.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. The chapter’s final words are Biblical in tone expressing almost a sentiment of doom. The last sentence references the song <em>Battle Hymn of the Republic</em> written by Julia Howe shortly before the American Civil War. The novel’s title is taken from a line of the song: "Mine eyes hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on." The "grapes of wrath" metaphor is also an allusion to Revelations 14:19 where evil people perish: "And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the wine press, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs." A number of themes are in play in this important passage from the novel. They include the inhumanity of the large farmers, their greed, the anger of the people and the hunger that drives that anger. Steinbeck warns of the rising wrath of people left to starve in a California rich with food destroyed because harvesting isn’t profitable enough. There is foreshadowing of a rebellion by the people against this cruel system. Personification is used by the author in his depiction of the pigs "screaming."

"Puts a weight on ya. Goin’ out lookin’ for somepin you know you ain’t gonna find."
Ma said fiercely, "You ain’t got the right to get discouraged. This here fambly’s goin’ under. You jus’ ain’t got the right."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. In the Weedpatch camp we witness the desperation of migrant families trying to survive, as the Joads run out of food. Pa’s dignity and sense of self-worth suffer because he is unable to find work to support his family. But Ma is annoyed at his negativity and demands: "We got to do somepin."

"Seems like times is changed," he said sarcastically. "Time was when a man said what we’d do. Seems like women is tellin’ now. Seems like it’s purty near time to get out a stick."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. When Ma Joad orders that the family quit Weedpatch camp in the morning to find cotton picking work up north, Pa Joad doesn’t react well. He attempts to save his role as leader of the family. But in doing so, he threatens to use a stick on Ma to regain dominance. This suggests that Pa is coming from a position of weakness in the family.

Ma put the clean dripping tin dish out on a box. She smiled down at her work. "You get your stick, Pa," she said. "Times when they’s food an’ a place to set, then maybe you can use your stick an’ keep your skin whole. But you ain’t a-doin’ your job, either a-thinkin’ or a-workin’. If you was, why, you could use your stick, an’ women folks’d sniffle their nose an’ creep-mouse aroun’. But you jus’ get you a stick now an’ you ain’t lickin’ no woman; you’re a-fightin’, ’cause I got a stick all laid out too."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. This is an important moment when we see how Ma Joad’s role has changed completely from a motherly to a leadership one in the family. Here she stands up to Pa’s threat to take a stick to her, by equally threatening him with a stick. Magnificently indominable as a wife, mother and woman, Ma reminds her husband that he has no right to control of the family since he has neither a job nor money. Pa’s loss of human dignity is evident in this chapter. Unable to find work in the new land of California, he is also losing his place as head of the family.

"Take a man, he can get worried an’ worried, an’ it eats out his liver, an’ purty soon he’ll jus’ lay down and die with his heart et out. But if you can take an’ make ‘im mad, why, he’ll be awright."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. After riling up Pa Joad by criticizing him out for having no job and threatening him with a stick, Ma Joad admits that there is method in her madness. She tells her son Tom that if a man gives in to worry he is defeated, but rouse him to anger and he’ll be fine.

She got up and went inside the tent. She came out and stood in front of Rose of Sharon, and she held out her hand. "Look!" The small gold earrings were in her hand. "These is for you."
The girl’s eyes brightened for a moment, and then she looked aside. "I ain’t pierced."
"Well, I’m a-gonna pierce ya."
…"You oughta been pierced long ago," said Ma. She looked at the girl’s face, and she smiled in triumph. "Now get them dishes all done up. Your baby gonna be a good baby. Very near let you have a baby without your ears was pierced. But you’re safe now."
"Does it mean somepin?"
"Why, ‘course it does," said Ma. "’Course it does."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. This passage marks an important symbolic transition for the pregnant Rose of Sharon from girl to woman. Ma offers pierces her daughter’s ears and give her treasured gold earrings to her. When Rose of Sharon asks if it means something and Ma repeats "’course it does," it signifies the importance of the act beyond Ma’s kindness. Ma is acknowledging her daughter as her eventual successor who will take over her role one day. By the end of the novel we witness Rose of Sharon’s growth from an immature and self-absorbed girl to a mature and selfless woman.

"It’s ’cause we’re a-workin’ together. Depity can’t pick on one fella in this camp. He’s pickin’ on the whole darn camp. An’ he don’t dare. All we got to do is give a yell an’ they’s two hunderd men out. Fella organizin’ for the union was a-talkin’ out on the road. He says we could do that any place. Jus’ stick together. They ain’t raisin’ hell with no two hunderd men. They’re pickin’ on one man."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. Willie Eaton explains about the power of unity and organized resistance. He says that police deputies do not pick on groups of organized migrants. That is the secret of the Weedpatch government camp’s success, independence and ability to keep state police out. Willie is chairman of the camp’s entertainment committee. He and Tom Joad and Jule Vitela are having a discussion about organizing the workers into a union.

"If a fella owns a team a horses, he don’t raise no hell if he got to feed ’em when they ain’t workin’. But if a fella got men workin’ for him, he jus’ don’t give a damn. Horses is a hell of a lot more worth than men. I don’ understan’ it."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. Willie Eaton lashes out at the broken system whereby migrant workers are exploited and used by employers for cheap labor. Horses are treated better than workers, he claims. They get fed while the families of workers cannot afford to eat. Just before this passage Willie hits at the low wages: "I been out here a year, an’ wages is goin’ right on down. Fella can’t feed his fam’ly on his work now, an’ it’s gettin’ worse all the time. It ain’t gonna do no good to set aroun’ an’ starve. I don’ know what to do."

A brown-faced man dressed in a light gray business suit got out and walked across to the truck…He wore a massive gold wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand. A little gold football hung on a slender chain across his vest.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26. This is a description of the man who offers the Joads work at peach pickers on the Hooper Ranch. His expensive suit and gold symbolize the wealth and greed of big farm owners who exploit the poor migrant workers.
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