This quote is from Steinbeck’s book, “East of Eden” and serves as a warning to us all –

The glory of love can transform our experience of life,

even when it rests upon an illusion.

Adam's love awakened something beautiful within him, though the woman he loved did not possess the goodness he imagined.

“Adam Trask grew up in grayness,

and the curtains of his life were like dusty cobwebs,

and his days a slow file of half-sorrows and sick dissatisfactions,and then, through Cathy, the glory came to him.

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster.”

Perhaps the deeper warning is this:

We must learn to recognize the capacity for both good and evil in ourselves, while being careful not to confuse the goodness we see in someone with the goodness that actually resides in them.

I’ve included the balance of the quote here if you want to read it.

“Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions,

of great virtues and great sins.

And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.

But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back.

Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free?

Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water?

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

Whatever Cathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam.

His spirit rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories.

The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground.

Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes.

Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl,

precious beyond thinking, clean and loving,

and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy.”

-East of Eden by John Steinbeck (chapter 13)