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John Steinbeck Quotes
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We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.
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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When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.
John Steinbeck
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Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
John Steinbeck
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The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.
John Steinbeck
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The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
John Steinbeck
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When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
John Steinbeck
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My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other...
John Steinbeck
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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?
John Steinbeck
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The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
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.
John Steinbeck
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The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
John Steinbeck
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The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
John Steinbeck
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A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
John Steinbeck
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In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.
John Steinbeck
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The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
John Steinbeck
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I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
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No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe
John Steinbeck
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The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.
John Steinbeck
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My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.
John Steinbeck
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A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.
John Steinbeck
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The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little 'why'.
John Steinbeck
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I have starved and it isn't nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.
John Steinbeck
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
John Steinbeck
Creative Commons
Born:
February 27, 1902
Died:
December 20, 1968
(aged 66)
Bio:
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories.
Known for:
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
East of Eden (1952)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Pearl (1947)
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