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I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

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
Think
Melody
Thinking
Form
Life
Stills
Still
Music
Kind
Good
Always

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As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
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And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.
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But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him... or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.
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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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There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
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The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
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There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers.
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The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
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I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.
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There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
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American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.
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It don't cost money to ask.
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Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
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I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
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I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
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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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I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.
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I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
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We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
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A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
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