"You got to live before you can afford to die."
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Quote collection
John Steinbeck quotes (page 28 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves."
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"One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction."
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"I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again."
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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."
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"The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible."
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"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair."
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"Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone."
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"When Kino had finished, Juana came back to the fire and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction - and that was conversation."
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"You stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too."
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"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man."
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"It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good."
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"I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it."
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"I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read."
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"I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener. There you have it. We are not of the same trade at all and so how can your rules fit me?"
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"It is the nature of a person as he/she grows older to protest against change, particularly changes for the better."
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"Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one."
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"And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living."
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"And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man."
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"One can't be happy as I have been for very long. There's a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate."
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