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You got to live before you can afford to die.

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
Afford
Dies
Live

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.
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There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.
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The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.
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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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Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.
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This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.
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But you can't start over Only a boy can start over You and me Why, we're all that's been
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Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.
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Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
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A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
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Fella in business got to lie an' cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That's what's important. You go steal that tire an' you're a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.
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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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The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.
John Steinbeck
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But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.
John Steinbeck
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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.
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Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.
John Steinbeck
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In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.
John Steinbeck
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I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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But a man needs company.
John Steinbeck