Quote

The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.

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
Littles
Somewhere
Little
Guess
Everything
Sin
Shuck
Giving
Inside
Discomfort
Way
Ways
Sins
Things
Lasts
Hide
Men
Last
Curious
Give
Manage

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I should have known I am the rain. I am the land and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.
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Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
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If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
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How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
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A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.
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Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.
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Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?
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In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
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He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.
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I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.
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The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
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Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
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Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.
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(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.
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I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.
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I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
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If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.
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Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
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A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
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She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.
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