How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
And I made some notes on a sheet of yellow paper on the nature and quality of being alone. These notes would in the normal course of events have been lost as notes are always lost, but these particular notes turned up long afterward wrapped around a bottle of ketchup and secured with a rubber band. The first note says: "Relationship of Time to Aloneness." And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. (3.3.12)
Apparently, solitude made the past, present, and future all equally available to Steinbeck; without someone to anchor you down into the present, you can just go all over the place. We suppose this is another way of saying that too much alone time can make you crazy and delusional.
Quote #8
After Spokane, the danger of early snows had passed, for the air was changed and mulsed by the strong breath of the Pacific. The actual time on the way from Chicago was short, but the overwhelming size and variety of the land, the many incidents and people along the way, had stretched time out of all bearing. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time. (3.7.13)
Steinbeck thinks a lot about memory and how it works, and here he suggests that the more eventful a past event was, the longer that remembered time will appear to be (in the mind of the person remembering).
Quote #9
This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and reaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction. (3.7.117)
Steinbeck defends himself against the possible charge that he just doesn't like change, claiming that he just plain doesn't like what Seattle's become—and not because he remembers the way it used to be. He claims he'd have had no idea he was in Seattle if someone had set him down there randomly, and he would have hated it just as much. So, we guess he would be okay with progress and change—if it just didn't look so much like "destruction" or general awfulness.