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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
Greatness
Glory
Tolerates
Dying
Satisfactions
Present
Rejects
Half
Tolerate
Future
Finds
Past
Remembered
People
Satisfaction
More quotes by John Steinbeck
Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession.
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A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
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A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
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Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
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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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I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
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All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.
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Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
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There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.
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A journey is a person in itself no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip a trip takes us.
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When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
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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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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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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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I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.
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A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?
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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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Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.
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...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
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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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