"Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world"
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Quote collection
John Steinbeck quotes (page 18 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York."
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"No one who is young is ever going to be old."
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"To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself."
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"People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments."
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"A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator."
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"Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late."
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"Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time."
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"Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed"
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"The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so."
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"Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them."
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"And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses."
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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’."
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"I know this... a man got to do what he got to do."
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"I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living."
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"At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars."
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"Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans"
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"I should have known I am the rain. I am the land and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while."
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"Courage and fear were one thing too."
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"[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest."
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