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John Steinbeck Quotes

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"Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased."

"No one wants advice - only corroboration."

"I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate."

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."

"Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it."

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world."

"The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage."

"The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong."

"One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: "Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.""

"Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."

"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time."

"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."

"Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals."

"I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable."

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

"I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool."

"Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic."

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