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A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
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
Future
Finds
Past
Remembered
People
Satisfaction
Greatness
Glory
Tolerates
Dying
Satisfactions
Present
Rejects
Half
Tolerate
More quotes by John Steinbeck
To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
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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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You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
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I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
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When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
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It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing to be loved without satiety.
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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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Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.
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Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world
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Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
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You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
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I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.
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You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?
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But you can't start over Only a boy can start over You and me Why, we're all that's been
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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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He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
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For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.
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He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?
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The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
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And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.
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