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In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.

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
Whether
Spanish
Doe
Greatly
Care
Direction
Find
Although
Mean
English
Going
Somewhere
Vacillating
Gets
Verb
Word
Verbs

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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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“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” “I don't know.” “Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
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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.
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Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
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A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
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Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.
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I guess there are never enough books.
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There are places in this world where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high colored magical confusion takes permanent hold...Surely Texas is such a place.
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I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.
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He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
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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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Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.
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Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.
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The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
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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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Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
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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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We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
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Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
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A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
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