"You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory."
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Quote collection
John Steinbeck quotes (page 16 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there."
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"We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent."
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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."
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"There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp."
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"The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement."
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"Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid."
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"These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new."
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"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."
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"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?"
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"Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep."
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"I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others."
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"There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy"
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"Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody."
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"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."
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"The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost."
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"The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index."
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"Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em."
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"Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there."
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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."
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