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Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.

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
Living
Death
Whole
Things
Life
Lordship
World
Unprepared
Assumed
Fearful

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When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
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A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.
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The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
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There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
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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.
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A man without words is a man without thought.
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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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I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.
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This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
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The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.
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One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter, Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.
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It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.
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It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place. Everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.
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New York is a wonderful city... It is going to be the capital of the world.
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She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
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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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This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
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If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
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I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
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Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
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