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My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

Jack London

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Jack London
Age: 40 †
Born: 1876
Born: January 12
Died: 1916
Died: November 22
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
San Francisco County
California
John Griffith Chaney
John Griffith Jack London
John Griffith Chaney London
John Griffith Jack London Chaney
Shall
Reject
Break
Broads
Free
Broad
Sense
Rejects
Entail
Great
Heritage
Unwise
Life
Delight
Chained
Slave
Ancestry
Ancient
Delights

More quotes by Jack London

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Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Jack London
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I love the flesh. I'm a pagan. Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!
Jack London
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And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.
Jack London
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It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)
Jack London
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But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
Jack London
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In a saturated population life is always cheap.
Jack London
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Pray do not interrupt me, he wrote. I am smiling.
Jack London
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If cash comes with fame, come fame if cash comes without fame, come cash.
Jack London
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Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.
Jack London
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His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.
Jack London
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I would rather be ashes than dust.
Jack London
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The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.
Jack London
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The great task demanded of man is reproduction. He is urged by passion to perform this task. Passion, working through the imagination, produces love. Passion is the impelling factor, imagination the disturbing factor and the disturbance of passion by imagination produces love.
Jack London
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I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.
Jack London
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I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.
Jack London
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Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.
Jack London
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I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums... All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me... Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.
Jack London
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But, – and there it is, – we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.
Jack London
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It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.
Jack London
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...in his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system and this made his damnation certain.
Jack London