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They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.
John Steinbeck
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And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
John Steinbeck
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And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
John Steinbeck
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There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.
John Steinbeck
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The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.
John Steinbeck
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He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
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A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.
John Steinbeck
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With a few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.
John Steinbeck
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This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
John Steinbeck
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For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from.
John Steinbeck
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Don't ever ask directions of a Maine native, I was told.
Why ever not?
Somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don't smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly. It is our nature.
John Steinbeck
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When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
John Steinbeck
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When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated.
John Steinbeck
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When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.
John Steinbeck
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A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
John Steinbeck
Creative Commons
Born:
February 27, 1902
Died:
December 20, 1968
(aged 66)
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