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A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

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
Kind
Drops
Mind
Horizon
Good
Sight
Lowers
Always
Works
Rifle
Writer
Horizons
Impossible
Sights
Another
Rifles
Writing
Pulls

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Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages.
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They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)
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A good writer always works at the impossible.
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To the heavens on the wings of a pig.
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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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So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.
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Lennie said quietly, It ain't no lie. We're gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an' live on the fatta the lan'.
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Saints can spring from any soil.
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How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
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Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
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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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The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.
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Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.
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But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
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A journey is a person in itself no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip a trip takes us.
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Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.
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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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Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.
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The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.
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People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
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