Quote

I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.

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
Chin
Chins
Difference
Differences
Getting
Death
Mind
Nibbled
Smacked

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The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.
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It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary
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Thou mayest rule over sin.
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I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.
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The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
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This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
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When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
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Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
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People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
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A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
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I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
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There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.
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The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.
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And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
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(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.
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Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.
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In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms
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What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
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Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.
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It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place. Everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.
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