Wit & Attitude Quote by John Steinbeck

Discontent, for Steinbeck, isn’t born from deprivation but from the eerie surplus of being “warm enough” and still shivering. The genius of the passage is its refusal to let comfort off the hook. Each clause stages a small betrayal of logic: fed yet hungry, loved yet yearning. He’s describing a psychic economy where satisfaction never fully cancels desire, where the body and the heart keep issuing invoices after the bill is paid.

The second-person “you” is doing quiet, brutal work. It drafts the reader into complicity, making discontent feel less like an individual failing and more like a shared condition, almost biological. Steinbeck’s list moves from the physical (warmth, food) to the intimate (love) and then to something harder to domesticate: yearning that “wanders in new fields.” That roaming image is key. The problem isn’t that you lack love; it’s that wanting is migratory. It crosses borders.

Then he introduces the real antagonist: “time, the Bastard Time.” Not time as wisdom or healing, but time as a heckler and agitator, prodding old aches back to life and inventing new ones. The insulted personification gives the line its grit; Steinbeck makes time culpable, not neutral.

Contextually, it fits his broader preoccupation with restlessness in a country that promises plenty but breeds dissatisfaction anyway. In the long shadow of economic hardship and social churn, he’s warning that even when material problems ease, the human problem persists: time keeps moving, and so does desire.