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)
Here we get more musings on isolation and how it can affect someone. Apparently, in Steinbeck's view, isolation makes past, present, and future all appear to be equally present, whereas having someone around forces you just to live in the here and now.
Quote #8
A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was a caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words.
Of course, Steinbeck always comes back to the dangers of being too isolated. Here, he suggests that if you get too accustomed to not being around people, you lose language—and the "shades of feeling" that come as a result of communicating. So, you not only lose words, but you also lose the emotions that they express. We guess it's all an illustration of that old saying "use it or lose it."
Quote #9
A little farther along I stopped at a small house, a section of war-surplus barracks, it looked, but painted white with yellow trim, and with the dying vestiges of a garden, frosted-down geraniums and a few clusters of chrysanthemums, little button things yellow and red-brown. I walked up the path with the certainty that I was being regarded from behind the white window curtains. An old woman answered my knock and gave me the drink of water I asked for and nearly talked my arm off. She was hungry to talk, frantic to talk, about her relatives, her friends, and how she wasn't used to this. For she was not a native and she didn't rightly belong here. (3.4.21)
Steinbeck encounters a woman who apparently has become so isolated that she appears to feel unsafe even in her own home. She is basically begging Steinbeck to stay and hang out with her.