"Vaseline? What the hell for?"
"Well, I tell ya what — Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife."" - Meaning and context.">
Ch. 2, p. 29

"Well, that glove's fulla vaseline."
"Vaseline? What the hell for?"
"Well, I tell ya what — Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife."

— John Steinbeck

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets ""Well, that glove's fulla vaseline."
"Vaseline? What the hell for?"
"Well, I tell ya what — Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife."" in the context of "Ch. 2, p. 29" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "John Steinbeck" (Quotes, Of Mice and Men (1937)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
John Steinbeck

About John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (27 February 1902 – 20 December 1968) was an American writer. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, his works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.