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When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.

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
Blast
Conscience
Friend
Gone
Shreds

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I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
John Steinbeck
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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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Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
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When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.
John Steinbeck
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The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.
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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It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
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A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.
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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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Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.
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Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
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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. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
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Books are the best friends you can have they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.
John Steinbeck
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No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
John Steinbeck
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Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.
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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.
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And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.
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You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.
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It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
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The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
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