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Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.

William Saroyan

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William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
Speak
Strength
Earth
Rest
Men
Taught
Call
Pretence
Race
Babies
Language
Hatred
Desire
Civilization
Fear
Baby

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Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
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The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
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Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
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The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.
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I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
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Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.
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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
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Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
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One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.
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Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
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We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
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There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?
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In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
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I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?
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I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
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It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
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Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.
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I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.
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