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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.

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
Years
Critics
Manuscript
Always
Material
Manuscripts
Men
Dog
Mice
Time
Tried
Critic
Materials
Literary
Firsts
Dogs
First
Excellent
Setter
Must
Red
Chewed

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The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
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I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
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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'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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Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.
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Saints can spring from any soil.
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And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, Use it well, use it wisely.
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Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
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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 dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.
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It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
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Courage and fear were one thing too.
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Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
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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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I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.
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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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So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.
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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 think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
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On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.
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