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A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.

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
People
Couldn
Beard
Didn
Wore
Truth
Suspect
Littles
Scar
Little
Suspects
Always
Anyway
Men
Liked
Like
Telling
Shave

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This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
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Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.
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A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.
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War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.
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I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.
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To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.
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I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.
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He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
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Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.
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People don't want advice...only corroboration.
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You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
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The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.
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The power of an attitude is amazing
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A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.
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..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.
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American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.
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Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.
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Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.
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Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.
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