Quote

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Profession
Squeak
Grateful
Impelled
Pride
Apologetic
Like
Roar
Mouse
Lion
Mice
Lions

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.
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Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
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Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?
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Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.
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The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
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The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
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Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
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One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter, Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.
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You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.
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I think I love you, Cal. -Abra I'm not good. -Cal Because you're not good. -Abra
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A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
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The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.
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Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
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Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.
John Steinbeck
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What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.
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But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him... or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.
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I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
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To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.
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Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.
John Steinbeck
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When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.
John Steinbeck