The Grapes of Wrath Quotes

And now the squatting men stood up angrily. Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An’ we was born here. There in the door – our children were born here. And Pa had to borrow money then. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and got a little bit of what we raised.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. When the landowners tell the tenant families that they must quit the land that they have been farming for generations, they react angrily. We learn that the bank got ownership of the land when the tenants had to borrow money in a bad year. But we should also note how the tenants acquired the land in the first place: they killed Indians and drove them off the land. It is ironic that the same thing is now happening to them.

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. No longer a human being, the bank has become a Frankenstein monster that humans created but now cannot control. The bank representatives conveniently evade personal responsibility for the inhuman actions of their employer.

Why don’t you go on west to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there’s always some kind of crop to work in.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The landowner, who has come to evict the tenant family from their home and farm, suggests that they travel to the Promised Land of California. The Golden State becomes the go-to destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the misery of the Dust Bowl. But the promise of a better life turns out to be a false one, there aren’t enough jobs for all the unemployed migrants who overcrowd California.

Snubnosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Steinbeck uses an effective metaphor to compare the powerful tractors that rip through the tenants’ farms to "snubnosed monsters." Stopping for nothing and no one, they destroy all before them. This passage speaks to the inhumanity of the banks, which sent in the tractors.

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The man driving the tractor across the evicted tenant family’s farm is dehumanized. A metaphor compares him to a robot. He neither looks nor acts like a man, and is an agent of the monster bank. This demonstrates the loss of humanity of those involved in the repossession of the tenants farms and home.

The monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him – goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This passage conveys the loss of humanity of the tractor driver hired to bulldoze an evicted tenant farmer’s land. Rendered speechless and blind, his mind is unable to resist the harm he is doing to the tenant family. His capacity for moral outrage has been corrupted. It is as if he has been possessed by the tractor and the bank monster that sent it out. He has been corrupted by the system.

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor – its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tractor driver is remarkably detached from the job of cutting up the repossessed farmland, performing it in a robotic way. He can admire the power of the great machine, but it’s not his tractor. And he feels no more love for the land than the banks, who are only interested in profit margins.

Behind the harrows, the long seeders – twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Technology and modernization have swept tenant farmers off lands that they have occupied for generations. Steinbeck presents the displacement of these families by tractors sent in by the banks as something unnatural, a violent assault, a metaphorical rape by a beast. He accuses the banks of raping the families’ way of life, the earth and their romantic association with the land.

And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumpled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This quote is about the rise of the machines. To Steinbeck, land responds differently to the machine than to the farmer who farms by hand, because with the machine the bond between humans and the land has been broken. To Steinbeck the machine farmer is dehumanized.

"Well, what you doing this kind of work for – against your own people?"
"Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner – and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tenant farmer accuses the tractor driver of betraying his own class. The bank is paying the son of a local farmer to plough up the tenant farmer’s repossessed land. But the tractor driver explains that he has no choice, he must earn money to feed his wife and children.

"But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?"
And the driver said, "Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tenant farmer excoriates the tractor driver for driving a hundred people to homelessness and hunger just to earn three dollars a day. He feels that what the driver is doing is a betrayal of his own class. But the tractor man asserts that his priority is his family’s welfare which takes precedence over the dispossessed tenant.

"Times are changed, don’t you know? Thinking about stuff like that don’t feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you’ll never get three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The important themes of betrayal, money and hunger are illustrated in this speech from the tractor driver. He defends taking a three dollar a day job to tractor out tenant farms that have been repossessed in his neighborhood. The tenant farmer should go and do the same job and feed his own children, the tractor man advises him.

"Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn’t successful he’s big with his property. That is so."
…"But let a man get property he doesn’t see, or can’t take time to get his fingers in, or can’t be there to walk on it – why, then the property is the man. He can’t do what he wants, he can’t think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big – and he’s the servant of his property. That is so, too."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This speech by a tenant farmer speaks to the strong bond that he has developed with the land, having worked for many years in the fields. The land has in many cases been passed down to successive generations. But hard times have struck and the banks have forecloses and evicted the tenants, rupturing that bond between man and the land.

"I got orders wherever there’s a family not moved out – if I have an accident – you know, get too close and cave the house in a little – well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tractor driver demonstrates his greed for a few extra bucks and his betrayal of his own people here. For a few dollars he is willing to do the dirty work of his bank employers and "accidentally" cave in a local tenant farmer’s house with the tractor. This shows how much he has been corrupted by the system, showing no humanity and thinking only of his own self-interest.

"It’s mine. I built it. You bump it down – I’ll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I’ll pot you like a rabbit."
"It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look – suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung there’ll be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. You’re not killing the right guy."
"That’s so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill."
"You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, ‘Clear those people out or it’s your job.’"
"Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’"
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me."
"I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This passage is a conversation between an evicted tenant farmer and tractor driver, hired to bulldoze the tenant’s land. It’s revealing and shows the destructive power of capitalism. It also portrays the hopelessness and powerlessness of the tenant farmer in fighting the capitalist banking system. In desperation, the tenant says that before he starves to death, he wants to kill the man who is starving him. Ironically many tenants will die trying to achieve this goal. The tenant want to fight the bank. But the bank is a giant faceless corporation that is too big to fight, as the tractor driver points out.

"Where the hell you s’pose he’s goin’?" said Joad. "I seen turtles all my life. They’re always goin’ someplace. They always seem to want to get there."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 6. When Tom unwraps the turtle from his jacket and puts it on the ground, it continues to head southward in the same direction it was going when he picked it up. Here he is comparing the animal’s wandering to his. The turtle is a metaphor and a foreshadowing of the journey that migrant farmers such as the Joads will make in search of a better life.

The red sun touched the horizon and spread out like a jellyfish, and the sky above it seemed much brighter and more alive than it had been.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 6. Red is often viewed as the color of passion and love, but in this case it represents something altogether different and more sinister. The red of a "brighter and more alive" sun over Oklahoma is the symbol of danger. As it dries out the land and leaves crops parched it is compared in a simile to a venomous jellyfish.
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